I find it fascinating that for a repository of German law, written in German, the README and commit history are all in English. I wonder if that will have the effect of scaring off any would-be contributors.
Doesn't change the commit history's melange of English and German.
The Eurobarometer report from 2006 says 56% of Germans speak English.
But I suspect that rather underestimates the case here. There is a huge difference between someone checking a box on a form that says they can speak English and being able to parse short messages in English.
And given only fairly educated, tech-savvy Germans are likely to participate in this, I think the negative effect from English commits is straight up zero, or at worst incredibly low.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-sp...
I have gotten reactions from "Why did you bother to learn German? Everyone here speaks English" to "Gott sei dank! Du kannst Deutsch" ("Thank god! You can speak German")
I'd like my government to do the same! Don't really care about the versioning system, as long as it's open-source and alive.