Petition for Recognition of Work on Open-Source as Volunteering in Germany

I agree with the goal but unless you create the petition using the official Bundestag website, this is about as useful as a thumbs up on Facebook.

If you make a petition with the official website and it passes they have to deal with it, even if its a rejection.

https://epetitionen.bundestag.de/epet/peteinreichen.html

I don't think that equating all open source work with volunteering makes sense.

Volunteering is defined by its charitable purpose for a public good, not by the specific skill used.

Let me try an analogy:

A chef who cooks a free meal for a homeless shelter is volunteering. That same chef publishing a recipe online or making a cooking tutorial is sharing knowledge, not volunteering. The act of 'cooking' or 'publishing' is neutral. It becomes volunteering only when the primary, direct, and organised purpose is to serve a charitable cause without expectation of personal gain.

Disclaimer: I have been consistently doing a lot of open source in the last 10 years. I would consider none of that as volunteering.

Previous discussion (141 comments) which used the German version of the URL a few months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46078770

As a German working with charities, this petition doesn't make any sense/is not specific enough to know what they actually want. There is no such thing as getting an activity recognized as volunteering. You either volunteer for a registered charity, or you don't. Nobody cares what you do for a charity, whether you write code for it or clean the toilets doesn't matter for recognition.

The petition only makes legal sense if it were to ask to extend the set of charitable goals as specified in the Abgabenordnung, but the existing set already allows for FOSS projects as part of e.g. the "national education" category (public code is educative).

And, to be frank, I also don't get the "recognition" part. The tangible benefits of volunteering for a charity are limited; what does it even mean to get recognition for it.

I very much hope this doesn't descend into licence wars but I would think all of the BSD, MIT, ISC, hold-harmless, RAND and GNU licences qualified. If that's true and it was understood the public/commons got an outcome, I'd be in favour.

If the code is under restrictive clauses, or gets tokenistic input and the quotient of time and money is spent doing something else, then I think this is a licence to cheapen out contracting rates for-profit.

How does an auditor know?

this is such a great initiative but I fear this may get exploited without proper structure.

As others have said, this needs to be addressed to the federal government and be in German.

It also needs to specify which kind of open source work is being done and for what ends.

The other problem is that if everyone works for free then most of us can't pay our bills.

What does it mean for volunteering to be "recognized" in Germany?

> Compensations could be paid tax-exempt

I think this is the real killer feature here. Software companies could save money by simply open-sourcing parts of their software.

What work would count as valid open source work though? I assume projects that people use are obvious. But what about ones where you're just throwing up your own projects where they start out with no users or impact? Even though its open source, does it need strategic importance from the get-go? Who decides?

It's ok to have a hobby. Not everything needs to be minmaxed to extract the maximum amount of money from the system.

I don't know if there is the concept of charity organisation in Germany but I feel this is the sort of thing that ought to be limited to registered charities not to be abused/get out of hand.

Many of my friends wouldn't qualify for this. They are either doing it as a hobby or to show the projects as their resume helpers.

You can already start a non profit in almost every country. If you're serious and at it for a while and have some structure.

On an individual basis I don't think giving tax breaks to anyone with a chatGPT tab open makes sense.

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