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

[mschild]

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

[tsak]

Furthermore, this petition should be written in German as well...

[palata]

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.

[atoav]

But the German word for it is "gemeinnützig" which loosely translates to "useful for the commons".

So also things like helping kids with their homework or giving people courses in your hackerspace, repaircafes, reading with others can fall into that.

So while maybe not all software that is open source also is automatically useful for the commons as it is now the definition is way too narrow. If you write software that helps one of the existing recognized causes it is openns source. If you write an open source photoshop or spend days working on software that keeps the world running you don't. But we need the latter people and supporting the former people makes the world a better place.

[zamadatix]

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

[thaumasiotes]

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

[guessmyname]

Certain reimbursements/allowances for volunteering are treated favorably for tax purposes if conditions are met, e.g. ehrenamtspauschale (volunteer allowance).

Also, as Gemeinnützig, for tax and for issuing donation receipts.

It could also function as community service hours ordered by a court (sozialstunden).

Stuff like that.

[zeeZ]

In addition to tax stuff there's a card you can get in most states, issued by cities/districts based on certain criteria, like doing a certain amount of hours per week of volunteer work, that will give you a discount or free entry to museums, pools, movie theaters, events.. There's listings online of all the institutions and businesses that give a discount.

[Mountain_Skies]

Though the petition is about Germany, in the US some entitlement programs come with work requirements that can be satisfied by volunteer work. Given the tech job market and how the US government's labor policies are detrimental to native workers, allowing them to keep their skills sharp through open source work while also satisfying the work requirements of various social programs, it seems like a decent trade-off. This presumes the government and the donors to the politicians that run it don't really want native workers to be unskilled. Their actions indicate the opposite, so that throws a bit of a wrench into things.

[kkarpkkarp]

Tax exempts (I'm not a German, but I was curious about the same and this is what ChatGPT told me :) )

[phendrenad2]

> 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.

[andyferris]

Interesting.

Similarly R&D tax incentives could be made to only apply if the R&D is publically available (for study, and any use)

[ggm]

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?

[rendx]

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.

[account42]

> but the existing set already allows for FOSS projects as part of e.g. the "national education" category (public code is educative)

It may be educative but that is hardly the most significant way in which open source code is beneficial to society.

[dhruv3006]

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

[presentation]

Yeah, I don't really want to subsidize people to work on open-source shitcoins for example. The devil is in the details here.

[on_the_train]

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

[em-bee]

the question is, if we as a society want to encourage activities that are for the benefit of everyone.

a sport maybe a hobby. running a sportsclub is volunteer work. writing code for fun is a hobby, publishing and maintaining it for others should be volunteer work.

[nephihaha]

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.

[vasco]

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.

[mytailorisrich]

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.

[nephihaha]

Big charities can be some of the worst for it while wee ones struggle to get off the ground with the red tape.

[system2]

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.

[thaumasiotes]

Why would that disqualify them? Those are also the reasons that people volunteer in soup kitchens.

[Uptrenda]

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?