I see the danger of corporations "reimbursing" people to work on very specific plugins and extensions, that coincidentally match the requirement of the corporation, at 12€/hour to evade taxes, social security contributions and minimum wage. As a German, I oppose that petition since "open source" is a vaguely defined term, and might not be clearly seperable from commercial work.
Aren't those kind of reimbursements usually strictly capped?
For example, if you do volunteer work in The Netherlands you can get at most €5.60/hour, with a maximum of €210/month and €2100/year. I assume Germany will have similar rules.
€12/hour is just about minimum wage. Explaining how that isn't a salary is going to be pretty much impossible - it'll rightfully be interpreted as tax fraud. On top of a violation of labor laws for paying less than minimum wage, of course.
I do see a lot of benefits, though. There are plenty of people who aren't well-off who are doing incredibly valuable work for F/LOSS project. If you're holding a conference you really want to be able to invite those people without putting the burden of travel expenses on them: a €200 train ticket can easily be a dealbreaker for a poor student.
I picked 12€ because I have heard of volunteers getting that. Depending on the kind of the work there can also be a fixed travel-reimbursement. I.e. donating blood gets you 20€ for roughly 60minutes of "work".
Why should "the burden of travel expenses" (lol) go away by creating a tax exemption? The organization paying for the ticket will OF COURSE still require the receipt.
You make it sound as signing the petition will result directly in a law with exactly that text. It is just a petition, so that some commission on the parliament takes that idea, discuss, process it, and eventually will be integrated in a law, where all that concerns will hopefully be addressed. If you want to be sure this discussion is worked with your ideas and ideology, make sure to vote correctly in the parliamentary elections. But not asking the parliament to initiate a debate, because a term in there is “poorly” defined, seems to me, not the best way of action.
There are usually strict requirements and checks on public services, so you can't just declare everything open source and gain the benefits. Additionally, paying a wage seems to be forbidden, only covering a certain amount of expenses, like travel costs, or I guess server-costs, is allowed. So you would need a very creative company to somehow convince people to work for them with this.
I don't think it'll go down as you said, but imagining if it does anyways: so what? As long as the software ends up FOSS, everyone would be able to take advantage of it, even if the corporations focus on their own uses first.
Hell, most FOSS today was created by a single individual/organization for themselves, figured it might be useful for others so they publish it under some FOSS-compatible license. That then others found it useful is the cherry on the top, not the core motivation.
> I oppose that petition since "open source" is a vaguely defined term, and might not be clearly seperable from commercial work.
it's a petition, not a law proposal
I still opose it as, "I am not signing that as I do not want to support that petition. If there was an alternating petition to cancel that in-favor petition, I would sign that."
At least it should be. I'm not sure what definition this petition would use.
The petition should use a more restricted definition, because the OSI definition only deals with the way software is developed and distributed, not how software contributes to the common good. That a lot of open source software is foundational to how most other software is written is incidental for the OSI, but important for this recognition.
In fact I see no reason why you can't already get this recognition in the existing legal framework by creating an association with a specific scope.
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Great idea, I think there should be some conditions.
a) you should not be the owner (to avoid pet projects that are not actually useful) of the project or at least not the sole owner
b) ideally it should be some high impact projects that have little to no corpo sponsors as opposed to something like React
c) if your contribution is not merged in, it should not count as "work done"
I think point a) is actually backwards and potentially counterproductive to the petition's stated goals.
The petition explicitly highlights maintainer burnout and the "unausgewogene Verantwortungslast" (unbalanced responsibility burden) as core problems. Excluding project owners/maintainers from recognition would exclude precisely the people carrying the heaviest load – the ones triaging issues at 2am, reviewing PRs, making architectural decisions, and bearing the psychological weight of knowing critical infrastructure depends on their continued engagement.
The XZ Utils incident is instructive here: the attack vector was specifically a burned-out solo maintainer who was socially engineered because he was overwhelmed and desperate for help. If anything, recognition and support structures should prioritize these individuals, not exclude them.
Your concern about "pet projects with no impact" is valid, but the solution isn't to exclude owners categorically – it's to define impact criteria. A threshold based on adoption metrics, dependency chains, or inclusion in public infrastructure would filter out portfolio projects without penalizing the people doing the most critical work.
Point c) also seems problematic for similar reasons: much of maintainer work isn't "merged contributions" – it's code review, issue triage, documentation, community management, security response. Under your criteria, the person who reviews and merges 500 PRs per year while writing none themselves would receive no recognition.
The petition is trying to address a structural problem where society extracts massive value from unpaid labor while providing no support structures. Excluding the most burdened participants seems like it would perpetuate rather than solve that problem.
I think limiting the recognition to repos that reach some level of significance would solve a lot of the problems.
It would anger the smaller projects and fresh projects, but it’s the only way to avoid having people create hobby projects or portfolio-filling slop repos and try to claim it as civic service.
This reminds me of a trend a few years ago when I started seeing a lot of applications from people who listed themselves as founders of a charitable foundation on their resume. I felt impressed the first time I saw it but got suspicious after the 3rd or 4th. Then I realized that it doesn’t take much work to incorporate a charitable foundation and list your family and friends as board members. The hard work was actually raising and disbursing money. When I started asking for details about how much the organization did I got wishy-washy answers and a lot of changing the subject. This is why details matter and it’s not as simple as giving everyone who claims an achievement the same reward, however small the reward may be.
Any time you introduce an explicit incentive, however small, to open source work the unintended consequences can become a problem.
The Hacktoberfest incident is a good example: The program offered a T-shirt to people who had a PR accepted. The result was tens of thousands of useless PRs across open source repos and maintainers begging for the program to stop so they could stop dealing with useless PRs. https://joel.net/how-one-guy-ruined-hacktoberfest2020-drama
In a situation like this you can’t assume that the set of people and the type of work being submitted will remain the same as before the incentive appears.
> if your contribution is not merged in, it should not count as "work done"
I highly disagree with this. Sometimes someone has to do the work to discover that isn't the work that should be done. As an example, last week, I got in a fight with the Go scheduler: https://github.com/php/frankenphp/pull/2016 -- in the end, we were able to find the one-liner that is a happy-medium. I didn't open that PR, but I did the work; if that makes sense.
In a program like this you can’t optimize for the assumption that every participant is acting in good faith and contributing good work even if it’s not accepted.
If a program incentivizes opening PRs even if they’re not accepted, the result will be a lot of maintainer spam from people opening useless PRs. This isn’t a personal hypothetical, it’s what we observe any time programs try to incentivize open source work. See the Hacktoberfest drama of years past where the promise of a T-shirt led to spam PRs across GitHub https://joel.net/how-one-guy-ruined-hacktoberfest2020-drama
At that point, you tackle abuse, which is a separate topic altogether.
It’s not a separate topic. You have to structure the program so that abuse is disincentivized from the start.
In the T-shirt example if you left the program as-is but then decided that tackling abuse is a separate topic, think about what that would look like: Every maintainer would now not only have to read and close the spam PRs, they’d have to go file an abuse report for every single one of them. Now you’ve put even more work on the maintainers and created an additional burden of reviewing reports, all without clarifying the program to discourage abuse from the start.
This is why it’s necessary to structure a program clearly such that abuse-level or low effort inputs can’t easily claim the rewards.
Agree but... these would be hard and expensive to assess objectively, in particular point b.
Does it need to be objective though? I think a vague list of criteria including "The project must benefit a community", or "The project must not be made solely for the benefit of their employer", and have someone review the proposal should be enough.
??? seems straightforward... among other things, require the applicant to do the work / provide evidence...
Some government team could just make a list of allowable projects, updating it every year, and starting for example with all projects with over 100 GitHub stars or some similar metric.
GitHub stars would be gamed immediately. You can already buy GitHub stars by the hundreds from spam services.
A better solution would be to require a written proposal which gets reviewed by someone who assesses against some criteria such as project age and other factors. Don’t make it too hard, but make it enough to stop the scheming individuals who think they’re going to start their own GitHub repo, set Claude Code loose in it once a week, and call it civil service.
> all projects with over 100 GitHub stars or some similar metric.
I think it would be difficult to come up with a good metric. For example, it should not be based on some easily faked number governed by a foreign company.
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> all projects with over 100 GitHub stars
Lol, they have been on sale online since forever, because investors apparently can be conned into thinking they have some value.
All my silly pet projects which are otherwise quite useless, were nonetheless very useful as didactic exercises.
Useful for you and your personal career growth, yes.
Important civic service that should be recognized, no.
I must completely misunderstand the purpose of the German system of conscription. I thought the point was to train the reserve populace in relevant skills to defence and public functioning, not just to extract labour.
> I must completely misunderstand the purpose of the German system of conscription
Conscription would be compulsory enlistment for service. That is, the government selects you for the work and you have no choice but to do it. It’s a rarely used practice almost exclusively employed for military service.
The topic of this petition is civic service. Civic service is volunteer work done for the good of the community. Civic service work needs to have a direct public benefit, not simply claiming that it makes you personally better educated.
Sorry you're right I was mistaking this with the civil service that was offered as an alternative to military conscription.
Would Linux count as a project with corpo sponsors?
Yeah, Linux definitely has corporate sponsors. This is not a good rule of thumb.
React is also now owned by the React Foundation, so I also don't see why it would be problematic to contribute to it now that it doesn't (seem to) belong to Facebook anymore.
I think the anti-corporate angle is a bit extreme as it would rule out a large number of projects that are widely used.
If the project is truly open source and widely used by the community it shouldn’t matter if it is or was associated with a corporation. Contributing to it helps the public who use that project too.
I mean the foundation is still mostly governed by corpo
Isn't that true for the linux foundation?
To a degree. But the corporate interest is spread across enough organisations that it's much harder for the Linux kernel to reject a patch solely because it's good for business, whereas a lot of corporate open source projects - even those with an OSI approved license - will actively refuse to merge code that competes with their commercial offering or simply isn't submitted by a customer. Hashicorp already operated like this long before they switched to BSL. Unfortunately having a project owned by a foundation isn't a good indicator either, because I know of at least one Apache project where the entire membership is one company, the CEO is the project chair and code is sometimes just dropped into repos in one huge commit.
How do you handle projects where the owner is part of a large community? Maintainers of very important or useful projects should count, right?
This is absolutely the correct next step. When considering starting a pretty sizeable FOSS project in the past (was going to be AGPL-3, we had a team and had just left another project to start this), we considered registering an e.V. in Germany, for many of the same benefits. Ultimately, the team disbanded for other reasons, but if this was in place, we would have likely been able to start much earlier and the team would not have disbanded most likely.
We were concerned about finances and legal protection.
To add some details actually; we were concerned about three major points:
1. The project would deal with user's data to some degree
2. The project was going to "annoy" an existing, much larger, project who would have likely tried to take some legal action to keep their "place at the top"
3. The project was going to both a) need to generate funds (and pay core developers), and b) be guaranteed to generate funds, based on our experience. However, we did not want to register a company as not having a company complicate things was one of the central goals of the split from the larger project. Try paying people a couple hundred bucks (less than minimum wage, more like Aufwandsentschaedigung) without having to jump through various hoops and without doing it illegally.
An e.V. in Germany mostly makes sense if it is also charitable. You will have a hard time justifying that for an arbitrary FOSS project.
There are about 100 categories that are predeclared as potentially charitable and you have to fit into one of them. Most of them are weirdly specific like homing-pigeon breeding or model plane flying.
The only two that are broader and remotely realistic candidates for a FOSS project are religion and education.
If you don't want to start a cult you are left with education. That is as how organizations like Chaos Computer Club do it. Education means education for the general public though and it is not enough if you offer occasional courses for a niche topic. It has to be something that potentially interests everyone. The tax office is checking that and it is on you proof it to them regularly.
Without open source there would be no code writing LLMs. It is charity of the highest order (to say the least).
In Germany, as I understand it, civic service can only be performed if you are "hired" by a recognized host organization, and host organizations must be non-profit, public, or community-benefit organizations.
So most certainly wouldn't be just "committing to Github projects from home", it would require a host organization to actually the legwork and get itself approved as non-profit but also as a host of civic services.
And knowing German bureaucracy, the above is not easy. ;)
I'm no lawyer or expert on these matters, but I know that Codeberg e.V. is considered charitable, so the people hired by Codeberg should be eligible for this already, I think.
I don't know if KDE e.V. is also considered charitable, but I assume they are, and they also hire developers. I'd be curious to learn how the tax reports in these situations work.
IMO it would be interesting to see those two specific Vereine getting volunteers.
Shouldn't open source be funded like scientific research is funded?
Are these petitions anything like what they've got in UK? IIRC in UK petitions that receive some threshold of votes must be debated in the parliament. Is this petition like that? Anyone from Germany can throw some light on how seriously these petitions are taken?
By the headline I thought they were talking about allowing one to contribute to OS instead of the newly introduced military service, that would be too good of a deal to be true.
Not against it but how do you track time spent on it?
Maybe the good old “lines of code” days will make a comeback?
Lines of code are easily produced using coding models. OK, so let's add another criterium, 'lines of code produced by a human'. Now some form of arbitrage is needed to discern vibe-coded lines from human-coded ones.
Also waiting for a prolific open source contributor to be canonized as a saint.
The license has to be central to something like this, and it has got to be copyleft and/or even some sort of nationalist German-MIT license that only grants permission to German citizens and companies. You can't let the German taxpayer get exploited for the benefit of foreign corporations.
The "spirit of open source" is not real. If you think that the only real gift is MIT-style permissively licensed stuff, you should be proud not to be recognized by the government. You should ask for no credit and no reward. Christmas gifts you buy for someone are taxed, and are not considered charitable contributions.
Otherwise, it is a great and vital idea. "Open source" is just not specific enough. It may even exclude GPL.
How does the tax-payer lose money on this? Is there money from the government involved here?
Nice, signed!
I mean sure why not?
As long as contributions happen in good faith and not just for the sake of contributing, but I'm assuming there's already a system in place to ensure that for other civic services.
As someone who has worked for the government, I think you at least mistaken or very naive if you think that.
What is the point? What benefits does an Ehrenamt even bring (fyi I have one) and why would an activity as broad as open source work qualify? Many open source projects are done without any good for the public, why should such a developer get such a title?
If you want any of this, why don't you found a Verein and have open source activities as the purpose?
All in all I an very much against this. Mostly because I think Ehrenämter, as they exist now, are pretty stupid and pointless and because I strongly believe the state should not get involved with this at all.
For non Germans, can you explain what this would mean? I read a machine translation of the article, and basically it seemed to be claiming that forming a tax exempt open source foundation in Germany would be easier if this were approved? But I may be missing some nuance in both the translation and the German legal and tax system to fully understand it?
In the USA, open source foundations can be non-profits, usually they are formed for scientific, and sometimes maybe educational purposes. (The allowed exempt purposes of a 501(c)(3), the most common type used for open source foundations, are "charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals".) There are other requirements that must be met for exemption as well.
I am curious how German and US laws differ in this regard, if you happen to know more about it. Thanks!
These are different concepts. What you are describing is an organization not operating for profit, which Germany of course has too. This is about open source contribution being an "Ehrenamt", which is when an individual participates in certain volunteer activities without pay. E.g. being a volunteer firefighter would be such an "Ehrenamt".
This is about recognition for individuals (which is much if what an Ehrenamt even is). Besides some very minor tax benefits, only applicable under certain circumstances, where you earn some money from your Ehrenamt activities, all this is, is an participation award for volunteer work.
I do volunteer work as a treasurer in a charity and I disagree on Ehrenämter being stupid and pointless, but otherwise I agree.
The petitioners seem to be blissfully unaware how civil service is recognized in Germany. Or they are all too much aware and want to undermine transparency requirements by asking for special treatment for open source developers. The charity principle requires to assume the former.
I definitely do not believe that the activities being done as part of an Ehrenamt are stupid
What I wanted to express is that it is "just" various forms of volunteer work, which ranges between some occasional organizational work in a Verein to doing hard physical labor at 3 in the night. What the petition argues is that open source developers "deserve" the title of "Ehrenamt", which really is what I disliked about the whole thing. Because effectively it is just a designation, nobody does their volunteering for that title or any of the benefits it gives you.
The demands of the petition would be solved by just founding a Verein (which is exactly the structure you want to organize volunteer activity), but as you said, if you wanted to interpret the petition as negatively as possible, the petition wants to avoid having a Verein, which enforces a certain degree of openness and transparency about finances.
For example, this would allow an open source project to split donations between contributors in a legal way
I don't think that is true at all. Do you have any evidence for this? What about not having an Ehrenamt makes it illegal to split donations?
If you want to have legal protections and a proper governance structure you would found a Verein. Codeberg has a Verein with Gemeinnützigkeit, which seems a superior, already established, way to accomplish this.
Apparantly you can receive up to 840€ per year tax free for it?
No. From the money you receive for your volunteer activities you can get that money tax-free up to 840 Euros. I have not gotten a single cent for my activities, so I have gotten exactly zero benefit from my Ehrenamt in that regard.
Open Source contributers often have a way to send them money. I assumed that this would then qualify for this tax excemption?
Maybe you are right and an Verein would be a better venue for this. What are your concerns with Ehrenämtern?
the point is that it would be easier to have such a verein recognized as being for public benefit.
Would it? E.g. Codeberg is gemeinnützige (for the public benefit) are there any examples of a Verein being denied gemeinnützigkeit based on the fact that open source development is not a recognized Ehrenamt?
> Many open source projects are done without any good for the public
Such as? By definition, open source projects are provided to the public, for free. That’s obviously a good for the public.
Note that in order for something to be a public service, it need not be useful for every member of the public. Most people have no interest in curling, but that doesn’t mean running a non-profit curling club that is open to everyone isn’t a public good.
I'm glad the last FizzBuzz-golfed-in-$esolang I put on the internet was "obviously a good for the public", although I wouldn't mind seeing your reasoning because it isn't clear to me how.
Demonstrating how it’s possible to do something is a public good. This really isn’t complicated unless you’re being deliberately obtuse.
Open-source ransomware?
> I don't see the point
> Therefore I'm against this
Dude.
Terrible deal for the German taxpayer. Excellent deal for Amazon et. al.
How so?
Big corporations benefit from OSS that Germany would now paying to write... exacerbates a preexisting power imbalance with OSS, similar reason some projects have moved to AGPL
The government does not give money for this, that is not the point and is not how this works at all. This would simply make it easier to get compensated for open source contributions (tax-free, to a certain small number).
reducing taxes is giving money
Not at the scale of Aufwandsentschaedigung (well under 1000 bucks a month before tax)
So they're not losing any tax revenue by doing this?
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Logic of open source:
1. I don't want to take responsibility for anything I do.
2. That's why I give away my work for free, so nobody has any right to complain. And so I don't have to be embarrassed of any shortcomings.
3. Some people take all my work and give me nothing back.
4. Now I get really angry that I didn't get anything for all the work I did!
5. So I demand that the government steps in and takes responsibility! And that they give me money and tax benefits!
Not really, I mean I don't "complain" about companies using my code and I don't demand much. I'm happy if they're honest enough to send me patches back. But if I know that my code is being used by German companies, then, as a German, it's only fair to ask for some breadcrumbs back (about 40-50% of your income goes to the state in Germany, it's not like the US). We could make "everything private only", but then it becomes very hard for people to start their own startups as they have to pay for every little thing, like in the 90s.
I do take responsibility for the code I write, often way more than some company CEOs ("just sell it bro"). I try to make efforts, but in the end I have physical limits. And many open-source developers are like that. It's more "well if we would put some miniscule effort to supporting open source, we'd all be better of, more sovereign, more independent of Big Tech, more innovation, etc. etc." - sure, not every GH project is "innovation", but many are, so just make some org where you could more easily apply for public funding, problem solved.
What I do at least demand is that the Jobcenter stops bothering me to "get a real job" (thankfully they're very lenient at least where I live). Or that there are more opportunities for funding Open Source. There are initiatives like the Prototype Fund, which is at least a start, but they are only spending about €1.8 million per year, which is literal pocket change for the German government. Meanwhile literal billions go to weapons development for random foreign countries.
Do I understand correctly that you're living on the government dole? Then wouldn't that support my original point? You can't do free volunteer work for unrelated party A and then turn around to unrelated party B and demand that they pay you for that. That's just wrong.
Apologies if I misunderstood, but your comment on Jobcenter gives this impression.
> "You can't do free volunteer work for unrelated party A and then turn around to unrelated party B and demand that they pay you for that."
The parties are absolutely not "unrelated". You are missing that, at least in Germany, the state is effectively a majority shareholder in every single company. For an average German SW dev salary of €80k, the state gets: €16k in social contributions (calculated on top of the salary) + about 32k in corporate tax, income tax, social security (again, on the worker side), sales tax, etc = 48k in total. So, in total, the German state gets about 50-60% of all money earned. It's not like in the US where taxes are lower.
Now, I "live on the dole" (because nobody wants to hire me for some reason) and create infrastructure that German companies use. I receive about €800/month (subsistence + health insurance), which is €9,600 per year. That is the cost to the state to keep me alive while I maintain infrastructure used by German companies.
Looking at the ROI for the German State, if only one single developer at a German startup saves a few weeks of work using my code, or if a startup can launch faster because of my open source work, the state makes that money back instantly. That is, assuming only a single company uses my code, while in fact, many do so silently.
And on top of that economic unfairness, the current system classifies Open Source work as "unemployment/leisure," whereas economically, it is unpaid R&D that fuels the very companies funding the state. There are strong differences in how "tech infrastructure" gets built in Germany vs the US:
- In the US, corporate taxes are much lower. Monopolies (Google, Meta, etc.) amass massive capital reserves. They effectively privatize public R&D (Go, React, PyTorch). They can afford to hire devs to work on OSS full-time because the state leaves them the money to do so.
- In Germany, the state takes ~50% of the money out of the ecosystem (between high income tax, social security, and corporate tax). Small and medium businesses (the "Mittelstand") do not have the surplus capital to fund "public good" R&D like Google does.
Since the German state extracts the capital that would otherwise fund this innovation, I can argue that the state has indeed an obligation to reinvest it into the ecosystem. Currently, they don't and they just waste the money on complete nonsense, wars, etc. and then tell OSS maintainers to also "get a real job and do OSS in your spare time".
I don't think 1, 2, and 4 apply to many high profile open source projects.
This message was brought to you by means of the Linux kernel (free software) running the GNU user space tools (free software) and the Nginx web server (free software) serving as a reverse proxy for the HN site (more or less free software, at least older versions are available).
All that work, for free, to allow you to complain about people writing free software. Entitled, you are.
Don't even get me started on Linux. No IT project has done more damage to the Internet than Linux, which has wasted billions of dollars worth of time for users and businesses of all kind. All because the allure of "free".
People used to be able to create and publish their own websites using only graphical interface software on their own home computers. Where did that go? Now you have to be a Linux system administrator to do the most basic online publishing, unless you want to be within somebody else's ecosystem.
How I wish that OS X would have won against Linux for servers, and normal people would have better access to express themselves online. But here I am, stuck with administering Linux servers...
I see the danger of corporations "reimbursing" people to work on very specific plugins and extensions, that coincidentally match the requirement of the corporation, at 12€/hour to evade taxes, social security contributions and minimum wage. As a German, I oppose that petition since "open source" is a vaguely defined term, and might not be clearly seperable from commercial work.
Aren't those kind of reimbursements usually strictly capped?
For example, if you do volunteer work in The Netherlands you can get at most €5.60/hour, with a maximum of €210/month and €2100/year. I assume Germany will have similar rules.
€12/hour is just about minimum wage. Explaining how that isn't a salary is going to be pretty much impossible - it'll rightfully be interpreted as tax fraud. On top of a violation of labor laws for paying less than minimum wage, of course.
I do see a lot of benefits, though. There are plenty of people who aren't well-off who are doing incredibly valuable work for F/LOSS project. If you're holding a conference you really want to be able to invite those people without putting the burden of travel expenses on them: a €200 train ticket can easily be a dealbreaker for a poor student.
I picked 12€ because I have heard of volunteers getting that. Depending on the kind of the work there can also be a fixed travel-reimbursement. I.e. donating blood gets you 20€ for roughly 60minutes of "work".
Why should "the burden of travel expenses" (lol) go away by creating a tax exemption? The organization paying for the ticket will OF COURSE still require the receipt.
You make it sound as signing the petition will result directly in a law with exactly that text. It is just a petition, so that some commission on the parliament takes that idea, discuss, process it, and eventually will be integrated in a law, where all that concerns will hopefully be addressed. If you want to be sure this discussion is worked with your ideas and ideology, make sure to vote correctly in the parliamentary elections. But not asking the parliament to initiate a debate, because a term in there is “poorly” defined, seems to me, not the best way of action.
There are usually strict requirements and checks on public services, so you can't just declare everything open source and gain the benefits. Additionally, paying a wage seems to be forbidden, only covering a certain amount of expenses, like travel costs, or I guess server-costs, is allowed. So you would need a very creative company to somehow convince people to work for them with this.
I don't think it'll go down as you said, but imagining if it does anyways: so what? As long as the software ends up FOSS, everyone would be able to take advantage of it, even if the corporations focus on their own uses first.
Hell, most FOSS today was created by a single individual/organization for themselves, figured it might be useful for others so they publish it under some FOSS-compatible license. That then others found it useful is the cherry on the top, not the core motivation.
> I oppose that petition since "open source" is a vaguely defined term, and might not be clearly seperable from commercial work.
it's a petition, not a law proposal
I still opose it as, "I am not signing that as I do not want to support that petition. If there was an alternating petition to cancel that in-favor petition, I would sign that."
Username checks out
Open source is defined by the Open Source Initiative: https://opensource.org/osd
At least it should be. I'm not sure what definition this petition would use.
The petition should use a more restricted definition, because the OSI definition only deals with the way software is developed and distributed, not how software contributes to the common good. That a lot of open source software is foundational to how most other software is written is incidental for the OSI, but important for this recognition.
In fact I see no reason why you can't already get this recognition in the existing legal framework by creating an association with a specific scope.
Great idea, I think there should be some conditions.
a) you should not be the owner (to avoid pet projects that are not actually useful) of the project or at least not the sole owner
b) ideally it should be some high impact projects that have little to no corpo sponsors as opposed to something like React
c) if your contribution is not merged in, it should not count as "work done"
I think point a) is actually backwards and potentially counterproductive to the petition's stated goals.
The petition explicitly highlights maintainer burnout and the "unausgewogene Verantwortungslast" (unbalanced responsibility burden) as core problems. Excluding project owners/maintainers from recognition would exclude precisely the people carrying the heaviest load – the ones triaging issues at 2am, reviewing PRs, making architectural decisions, and bearing the psychological weight of knowing critical infrastructure depends on their continued engagement.
The XZ Utils incident is instructive here: the attack vector was specifically a burned-out solo maintainer who was socially engineered because he was overwhelmed and desperate for help. If anything, recognition and support structures should prioritize these individuals, not exclude them. Your concern about "pet projects with no impact" is valid, but the solution isn't to exclude owners categorically – it's to define impact criteria. A threshold based on adoption metrics, dependency chains, or inclusion in public infrastructure would filter out portfolio projects without penalizing the people doing the most critical work.
Point c) also seems problematic for similar reasons: much of maintainer work isn't "merged contributions" – it's code review, issue triage, documentation, community management, security response. Under your criteria, the person who reviews and merges 500 PRs per year while writing none themselves would receive no recognition.
The petition is trying to address a structural problem where society extracts massive value from unpaid labor while providing no support structures. Excluding the most burdened participants seems like it would perpetuate rather than solve that problem.
I think limiting the recognition to repos that reach some level of significance would solve a lot of the problems.
It would anger the smaller projects and fresh projects, but it’s the only way to avoid having people create hobby projects or portfolio-filling slop repos and try to claim it as civic service.
This reminds me of a trend a few years ago when I started seeing a lot of applications from people who listed themselves as founders of a charitable foundation on their resume. I felt impressed the first time I saw it but got suspicious after the 3rd or 4th. Then I realized that it doesn’t take much work to incorporate a charitable foundation and list your family and friends as board members. The hard work was actually raising and disbursing money. When I started asking for details about how much the organization did I got wishy-washy answers and a lot of changing the subject. This is why details matter and it’s not as simple as giving everyone who claims an achievement the same reward, however small the reward may be.
Any time you introduce an explicit incentive, however small, to open source work the unintended consequences can become a problem.
The Hacktoberfest incident is a good example: The program offered a T-shirt to people who had a PR accepted. The result was tens of thousands of useless PRs across open source repos and maintainers begging for the program to stop so they could stop dealing with useless PRs. https://joel.net/how-one-guy-ruined-hacktoberfest2020-drama
In a situation like this you can’t assume that the set of people and the type of work being submitted will remain the same as before the incentive appears.
> if your contribution is not merged in, it should not count as "work done"
I highly disagree with this. Sometimes someone has to do the work to discover that isn't the work that should be done. As an example, last week, I got in a fight with the Go scheduler: https://github.com/php/frankenphp/pull/2016 -- in the end, we were able to find the one-liner that is a happy-medium. I didn't open that PR, but I did the work; if that makes sense.
In a program like this you can’t optimize for the assumption that every participant is acting in good faith and contributing good work even if it’s not accepted.
If a program incentivizes opening PRs even if they’re not accepted, the result will be a lot of maintainer spam from people opening useless PRs. This isn’t a personal hypothetical, it’s what we observe any time programs try to incentivize open source work. See the Hacktoberfest drama of years past where the promise of a T-shirt led to spam PRs across GitHub https://joel.net/how-one-guy-ruined-hacktoberfest2020-drama
At that point, you tackle abuse, which is a separate topic altogether.
It’s not a separate topic. You have to structure the program so that abuse is disincentivized from the start.
In the T-shirt example if you left the program as-is but then decided that tackling abuse is a separate topic, think about what that would look like: Every maintainer would now not only have to read and close the spam PRs, they’d have to go file an abuse report for every single one of them. Now you’ve put even more work on the maintainers and created an additional burden of reviewing reports, all without clarifying the program to discourage abuse from the start.
This is why it’s necessary to structure a program clearly such that abuse-level or low effort inputs can’t easily claim the rewards.
Agree but... these would be hard and expensive to assess objectively, in particular point b.
Does it need to be objective though? I think a vague list of criteria including "The project must benefit a community", or "The project must not be made solely for the benefit of their employer", and have someone review the proposal should be enough.
??? seems straightforward... among other things, require the applicant to do the work / provide evidence...
Some government team could just make a list of allowable projects, updating it every year, and starting for example with all projects with over 100 GitHub stars or some similar metric.
GitHub stars would be gamed immediately. You can already buy GitHub stars by the hundreds from spam services.
A better solution would be to require a written proposal which gets reviewed by someone who assesses against some criteria such as project age and other factors. Don’t make it too hard, but make it enough to stop the scheming individuals who think they’re going to start their own GitHub repo, set Claude Code loose in it once a week, and call it civil service.
> all projects with over 100 GitHub stars or some similar metric.
I think it would be difficult to come up with a good metric. For example, it should not be based on some easily faked number governed by a foreign company.
> all projects with over 100 GitHub stars
Lol, they have been on sale online since forever, because investors apparently can be conned into thinking they have some value.
All my silly pet projects which are otherwise quite useless, were nonetheless very useful as didactic exercises.
Useful for you and your personal career growth, yes.
Important civic service that should be recognized, no.
I must completely misunderstand the purpose of the German system of conscription. I thought the point was to train the reserve populace in relevant skills to defence and public functioning, not just to extract labour.
> I must completely misunderstand the purpose of the German system of conscription
Conscription would be compulsory enlistment for service. That is, the government selects you for the work and you have no choice but to do it. It’s a rarely used practice almost exclusively employed for military service.
The topic of this petition is civic service. Civic service is volunteer work done for the good of the community. Civic service work needs to have a direct public benefit, not simply claiming that it makes you personally better educated.
Sorry you're right I was mistaking this with the civil service that was offered as an alternative to military conscription.
Would Linux count as a project with corpo sponsors?
Yeah, Linux definitely has corporate sponsors. This is not a good rule of thumb.
React is also now owned by the React Foundation, so I also don't see why it would be problematic to contribute to it now that it doesn't (seem to) belong to Facebook anymore.
I think the anti-corporate angle is a bit extreme as it would rule out a large number of projects that are widely used.
If the project is truly open source and widely used by the community it shouldn’t matter if it is or was associated with a corporation. Contributing to it helps the public who use that project too.
I mean the foundation is still mostly governed by corpo
Isn't that true for the linux foundation?
To a degree. But the corporate interest is spread across enough organisations that it's much harder for the Linux kernel to reject a patch solely because it's good for business, whereas a lot of corporate open source projects - even those with an OSI approved license - will actively refuse to merge code that competes with their commercial offering or simply isn't submitted by a customer. Hashicorp already operated like this long before they switched to BSL. Unfortunately having a project owned by a foundation isn't a good indicator either, because I know of at least one Apache project where the entire membership is one company, the CEO is the project chair and code is sometimes just dropped into repos in one huge commit.
How do you handle projects where the owner is part of a large community? Maintainers of very important or useful projects should count, right?
This is absolutely the correct next step. When considering starting a pretty sizeable FOSS project in the past (was going to be AGPL-3, we had a team and had just left another project to start this), we considered registering an e.V. in Germany, for many of the same benefits. Ultimately, the team disbanded for other reasons, but if this was in place, we would have likely been able to start much earlier and the team would not have disbanded most likely.
We were concerned about finances and legal protection.
To add some details actually; we were concerned about three major points:
1. The project would deal with user's data to some degree
2. The project was going to "annoy" an existing, much larger, project who would have likely tried to take some legal action to keep their "place at the top"
3. The project was going to both a) need to generate funds (and pay core developers), and b) be guaranteed to generate funds, based on our experience. However, we did not want to register a company as not having a company complicate things was one of the central goals of the split from the larger project. Try paying people a couple hundred bucks (less than minimum wage, more like Aufwandsentschaedigung) without having to jump through various hoops and without doing it illegally.
An e.V. in Germany mostly makes sense if it is also charitable. You will have a hard time justifying that for an arbitrary FOSS project.
There are about 100 categories that are predeclared as potentially charitable and you have to fit into one of them. Most of them are weirdly specific like homing-pigeon breeding or model plane flying.
The only two that are broader and remotely realistic candidates for a FOSS project are religion and education.
If you don't want to start a cult you are left with education. That is as how organizations like Chaos Computer Club do it. Education means education for the general public though and it is not enough if you offer occasional courses for a niche topic. It has to be something that potentially interests everyone. The tax office is checking that and it is on you proof it to them regularly.
Without open source there would be no code writing LLMs. It is charity of the highest order (to say the least).
In Germany, as I understand it, civic service can only be performed if you are "hired" by a recognized host organization, and host organizations must be non-profit, public, or community-benefit organizations.
So most certainly wouldn't be just "committing to Github projects from home", it would require a host organization to actually the legwork and get itself approved as non-profit but also as a host of civic services.
And knowing German bureaucracy, the above is not easy. ;)
I'm no lawyer or expert on these matters, but I know that Codeberg e.V. is considered charitable, so the people hired by Codeberg should be eligible for this already, I think.
I don't know if KDE e.V. is also considered charitable, but I assume they are, and they also hire developers. I'd be curious to learn how the tax reports in these situations work.
IMO it would be interesting to see those two specific Vereine getting volunteers.
Why not petition to change § 52 AO directly? I made such a petition a couple of years ago but didn't get around to promote it: https://www.openpetition.de/petition/online/anerkennung-der-...
Shouldn't open source be funded like scientific research is funded?
Are these petitions anything like what they've got in UK? IIRC in UK petitions that receive some threshold of votes must be debated in the parliament. Is this petition like that? Anyone from Germany can throw some light on how seriously these petitions are taken?
By the headline I thought they were talking about allowing one to contribute to OS instead of the newly introduced military service, that would be too good of a deal to be true.
Not against it but how do you track time spent on it?
Maybe the good old “lines of code” days will make a comeback?
https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
Human written or also AI?
Lines of code are easily produced using coding models. OK, so let's add another criterium, 'lines of code produced by a human'. Now some form of arbitrage is needed to discern vibe-coded lines from human-coded ones.
Also waiting for a prolific open source contributor to be canonized as a saint.
The license has to be central to something like this, and it has got to be copyleft and/or even some sort of nationalist German-MIT license that only grants permission to German citizens and companies. You can't let the German taxpayer get exploited for the benefit of foreign corporations.
The "spirit of open source" is not real. If you think that the only real gift is MIT-style permissively licensed stuff, you should be proud not to be recognized by the government. You should ask for no credit and no reward. Christmas gifts you buy for someone are taxed, and are not considered charitable contributions.
Otherwise, it is a great and vital idea. "Open source" is just not specific enough. It may even exclude GPL.
How does the tax-payer lose money on this? Is there money from the government involved here?
Nice, signed!
I mean sure why not?
As long as contributions happen in good faith and not just for the sake of contributing, but I'm assuming there's already a system in place to ensure that for other civic services.
As someone who has worked for the government, I think you at least mistaken or very naive if you think that.
What is the point? What benefits does an Ehrenamt even bring (fyi I have one) and why would an activity as broad as open source work qualify? Many open source projects are done without any good for the public, why should such a developer get such a title?
If you want any of this, why don't you found a Verein and have open source activities as the purpose?
All in all I an very much against this. Mostly because I think Ehrenämter, as they exist now, are pretty stupid and pointless and because I strongly believe the state should not get involved with this at all.
For non Germans, can you explain what this would mean? I read a machine translation of the article, and basically it seemed to be claiming that forming a tax exempt open source foundation in Germany would be easier if this were approved? But I may be missing some nuance in both the translation and the German legal and tax system to fully understand it?
In the USA, open source foundations can be non-profits, usually they are formed for scientific, and sometimes maybe educational purposes. (The allowed exempt purposes of a 501(c)(3), the most common type used for open source foundations, are "charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals".) There are other requirements that must be met for exemption as well.
I am curious how German and US laws differ in this regard, if you happen to know more about it. Thanks!
These are different concepts. What you are describing is an organization not operating for profit, which Germany of course has too. This is about open source contribution being an "Ehrenamt", which is when an individual participates in certain volunteer activities without pay. E.g. being a volunteer firefighter would be such an "Ehrenamt".
This is about recognition for individuals (which is much if what an Ehrenamt even is). Besides some very minor tax benefits, only applicable under certain circumstances, where you earn some money from your Ehrenamt activities, all this is, is an participation award for volunteer work.
I do volunteer work as a treasurer in a charity and I disagree on Ehrenämter being stupid and pointless, but otherwise I agree.
The petitioners seem to be blissfully unaware how civil service is recognized in Germany. Or they are all too much aware and want to undermine transparency requirements by asking for special treatment for open source developers. The charity principle requires to assume the former.
I definitely do not believe that the activities being done as part of an Ehrenamt are stupid
What I wanted to express is that it is "just" various forms of volunteer work, which ranges between some occasional organizational work in a Verein to doing hard physical labor at 3 in the night. What the petition argues is that open source developers "deserve" the title of "Ehrenamt", which really is what I disliked about the whole thing. Because effectively it is just a designation, nobody does their volunteering for that title or any of the benefits it gives you.
The demands of the petition would be solved by just founding a Verein (which is exactly the structure you want to organize volunteer activity), but as you said, if you wanted to interpret the petition as negatively as possible, the petition wants to avoid having a Verein, which enforces a certain degree of openness and transparency about finances.
For example, this would allow an open source project to split donations between contributors in a legal way
I don't think that is true at all. Do you have any evidence for this? What about not having an Ehrenamt makes it illegal to split donations?
If you want to have legal protections and a proper governance structure you would found a Verein. Codeberg has a Verein with Gemeinnützigkeit, which seems a superior, already established, way to accomplish this.
Apparantly you can receive up to 840€ per year tax free for it?
No. From the money you receive for your volunteer activities you can get that money tax-free up to 840 Euros. I have not gotten a single cent for my activities, so I have gotten exactly zero benefit from my Ehrenamt in that regard.
Open Source contributers often have a way to send them money. I assumed that this would then qualify for this tax excemption?
Maybe you are right and an Verein would be a better venue for this. What are your concerns with Ehrenämtern?
the point is that it would be easier to have such a verein recognized as being for public benefit.
Would it? E.g. Codeberg is gemeinnützige (for the public benefit) are there any examples of a Verein being denied gemeinnützigkeit based on the fact that open source development is not a recognized Ehrenamt?
> Many open source projects are done without any good for the public
Such as? By definition, open source projects are provided to the public, for free. That’s obviously a good for the public.
Note that in order for something to be a public service, it need not be useful for every member of the public. Most people have no interest in curling, but that doesn’t mean running a non-profit curling club that is open to everyone isn’t a public good.
I'm glad the last FizzBuzz-golfed-in-$esolang I put on the internet was "obviously a good for the public", although I wouldn't mind seeing your reasoning because it isn't clear to me how.
Demonstrating how it’s possible to do something is a public good. This really isn’t complicated unless you’re being deliberately obtuse.
Open-source ransomware?
> I don't see the point
> Therefore I'm against this
Dude.
Terrible deal for the German taxpayer. Excellent deal for Amazon et. al.
How so?
Big corporations benefit from OSS that Germany would now paying to write... exacerbates a preexisting power imbalance with OSS, similar reason some projects have moved to AGPL
The government does not give money for this, that is not the point and is not how this works at all. This would simply make it easier to get compensated for open source contributions (tax-free, to a certain small number).
reducing taxes is giving money
Not at the scale of Aufwandsentschaedigung (well under 1000 bucks a month before tax)
So they're not losing any tax revenue by doing this?
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Logic of open source:
1. I don't want to take responsibility for anything I do.
2. That's why I give away my work for free, so nobody has any right to complain. And so I don't have to be embarrassed of any shortcomings.
3. Some people take all my work and give me nothing back.
4. Now I get really angry that I didn't get anything for all the work I did!
5. So I demand that the government steps in and takes responsibility! And that they give me money and tax benefits!
Not really, I mean I don't "complain" about companies using my code and I don't demand much. I'm happy if they're honest enough to send me patches back. But if I know that my code is being used by German companies, then, as a German, it's only fair to ask for some breadcrumbs back (about 40-50% of your income goes to the state in Germany, it's not like the US). We could make "everything private only", but then it becomes very hard for people to start their own startups as they have to pay for every little thing, like in the 90s.
I do take responsibility for the code I write, often way more than some company CEOs ("just sell it bro"). I try to make efforts, but in the end I have physical limits. And many open-source developers are like that. It's more "well if we would put some miniscule effort to supporting open source, we'd all be better of, more sovereign, more independent of Big Tech, more innovation, etc. etc." - sure, not every GH project is "innovation", but many are, so just make some org where you could more easily apply for public funding, problem solved.
What I do at least demand is that the Jobcenter stops bothering me to "get a real job" (thankfully they're very lenient at least where I live). Or that there are more opportunities for funding Open Source. There are initiatives like the Prototype Fund, which is at least a start, but they are only spending about €1.8 million per year, which is literal pocket change for the German government. Meanwhile literal billions go to weapons development for random foreign countries.
Do I understand correctly that you're living on the government dole? Then wouldn't that support my original point? You can't do free volunteer work for unrelated party A and then turn around to unrelated party B and demand that they pay you for that. That's just wrong.
Apologies if I misunderstood, but your comment on Jobcenter gives this impression.
> "You can't do free volunteer work for unrelated party A and then turn around to unrelated party B and demand that they pay you for that."
The parties are absolutely not "unrelated". You are missing that, at least in Germany, the state is effectively a majority shareholder in every single company. For an average German SW dev salary of €80k, the state gets: €16k in social contributions (calculated on top of the salary) + about 32k in corporate tax, income tax, social security (again, on the worker side), sales tax, etc = 48k in total. So, in total, the German state gets about 50-60% of all money earned. It's not like in the US where taxes are lower.
Now, I "live on the dole" (because nobody wants to hire me for some reason) and create infrastructure that German companies use. I receive about €800/month (subsistence + health insurance), which is €9,600 per year. That is the cost to the state to keep me alive while I maintain infrastructure used by German companies.
Looking at the ROI for the German State, if only one single developer at a German startup saves a few weeks of work using my code, or if a startup can launch faster because of my open source work, the state makes that money back instantly. That is, assuming only a single company uses my code, while in fact, many do so silently.
And on top of that economic unfairness, the current system classifies Open Source work as "unemployment/leisure," whereas economically, it is unpaid R&D that fuels the very companies funding the state. There are strong differences in how "tech infrastructure" gets built in Germany vs the US:
- In the US, corporate taxes are much lower. Monopolies (Google, Meta, etc.) amass massive capital reserves. They effectively privatize public R&D (Go, React, PyTorch). They can afford to hire devs to work on OSS full-time because the state leaves them the money to do so.
- In Germany, the state takes ~50% of the money out of the ecosystem (between high income tax, social security, and corporate tax). Small and medium businesses (the "Mittelstand") do not have the surplus capital to fund "public good" R&D like Google does.
Since the German state extracts the capital that would otherwise fund this innovation, I can argue that the state has indeed an obligation to reinvest it into the ecosystem. Currently, they don't and they just waste the money on complete nonsense, wars, etc. and then tell OSS maintainers to also "get a real job and do OSS in your spare time".
I don't think 1, 2, and 4 apply to many high profile open source projects.
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All that work, for free, to allow you to complain about people writing free software. Entitled, you are.
Don't even get me started on Linux. No IT project has done more damage to the Internet than Linux, which has wasted billions of dollars worth of time for users and businesses of all kind. All because the allure of "free".
People used to be able to create and publish their own websites using only graphical interface software on their own home computers. Where did that go? Now you have to be a Linux system administrator to do the most basic online publishing, unless you want to be within somebody else's ecosystem.
How I wish that OS X would have won against Linux for servers, and normal people would have better access to express themselves online. But here I am, stuck with administering Linux servers...
yea its wild