Petition to formally recognize open source work as civic service in Germany
openpetition.de
openpetition.de
At least it should be. I'm not sure what definition this petition would use.
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.
So it should be the FSF's definition of free software, https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
it's a petition, not a law proposal
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.
(As a donor I tried to sell blood when I couldn't afford rent and food, but it seemed impossible.)
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 probably do hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of work, for free. It would be nice to be able to use some of that, as a tax break. It would be a drop in the bucket, compared to the monster breaks corporations get.
I would be more worried about rigidly defining "open source." We see battles on HN, about the definition of "open source." It could end up specifying something like only release of GPL-licensed code is allowed, which might seem OK, but that's sort of taking a "political" stance.
I release all my stuff MIT (usually). That's mainly because I don't care if anyone takes it, and gets rich (Fat chance, anyway. My stuff isn't that amazing), and I'm not interested in coercing anyone else to take my political stance. I just don't want some bunghole suing me for something out of my control.
TIL: EUPL is a thing.
Thanks!
Just like they pay for research programs.
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 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.
The last time I was there, I had the poor luck to schedule my train out of Berlin as a protest was being held. People were super polite, parting ways for me then going back to their thing. One of the leaders must have heard through the grapevine I was a travelling academic and tried to put me on the spot if I "supported" the protest. (They were unhappy about the Trans Pacific Partnership).
I told him I study privacy, not law nor economics so I don't feel qualified to comment on a trade agreement, but I certainly support their right to express their opinion.
And with that, what very little hostility I'd encountered that day vanished, and I went off to eat my currywurst, drink my beer, and watch some videos on my laptop while waiting for my train.
I'm going to pause and say maybe this is the kind of policy question we should leave to the citizens of said country... it seems to center around extremely technical terms in a legal system a lot of us on (overwhelmingly American) HN have very little understanding.
Germany has a history of being extremely supportive of open source -- when I was exploring the clubs, the only black shirt I had was one with a giant Firefox logo, and I got a lot of postive feedback and even let past the line at one place, so I'd be curious what German citizens have to say on the matter before forming my own opinion.
Indeed it should be up to Germans to decide how to handle this, but given their general respect for The Common Good, I'm positive about such a law. Godspeed!
So definitely want to be mindful you don't open the door to tax avoidance and exploitation under the guise of charity.
I know very little about the EU, but I've worked with nonprofits a lot in the USA and there's a lot that are basically corporate cut outs used to lobbying that's a stretch to say is in the public interest.
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 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.
Lol, they have been on sale online since forever, because investors apparently can be conned into thinking they have some value.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Important civic service that should be recognized, no.
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.
We were concerned about finances and legal protection.
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.
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.
Chaos Computer Club is not a charity.
I believe the "Chaos Computer Club München e.V" is (or was at some point in time) charitable. At least their bylaws have the magic words:
"Durch die genannten Zwecke sollen Kultur, Bildung und Wissenschaft gefördert werden."
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.
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.
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.
Some open source software has changed the world, for the better. By quantity, most open source repositories are forks of another with no changes, new projects abandoned before getting anywhere, abandonware that an author has moved on from, or that the world has moved on from. They're no more than digital litter. If they were real world artifacts, they would be disposed of as trash, or sold to asset strippers, or nature would rot them away eventually. In the digital world we have built a hoarder's paradise and that has costs - costs to read through them, sort through them, decide if they are worth bothering with. Costs of leaving outdated, misleading, insecure, unreliable, code hanging around for people (and LLMs) to 'learn' from in negative ways.
It's probably good that any developer or hobbyist can build their own blog engine. It's not "obviously" good that the public benefits from 5,000 partial blog engines, let alone 50,000 of them, or in a hundred years 5,000,000 of them; one doesn't have to be deliberately obtuse to question that.
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!
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.
> Therefore I'm against this
Dude.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
All that work, for free, to allow you to complain about people writing free software. Entitled, you are.
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 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.
Apologies if I misunderstood, but your comment on Jobcenter gives this impression.
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 enjoy painting, and could of course go and hang my paintings in the public square. Some very important lawyers and engineers might walk past my paintings on their way to work and be edified by them, thus increasing their productivity with 0.3% each day. That would translate into thousands of euros in increased tax revenue for the German government, so it's only fair that they keep paying me my gibs each month for me to keep painting, and stop bothering me about getting a job....
But I'd like to assume that your open source code is very important and essential for some IT applications. I wouldn't doubt that. That also means big businesses are using your code and making a lot of money from it, paying their engineers juicy salaries with that money. You should go to those businesses and demand a job, and not take government gibs, which is tax money that has been extracted by oppressing people who work low salary jobs.
Of course you are unemployed then, you're working for free for big businesses and letting the tax payer pay for your upkeep! Why would they hire you when they get your labour for free?
That's the evil of open source.