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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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All that work, for free, to allow you to complain about people writing free software. Entitled, you are.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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
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"
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.
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.
> 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.
All my silly pet projects which are otherwise quite useless, were nonetheless very useful as didactic exercises.
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.
3 replies →
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.
3 replies →
How do you handle projects where the owner is part of a large community? Maintainers of very important or useful projects should count, right?
Without open source there would be no code writing LLMs. It is charity of the highest order (to say the least).
Shouldn't open source be funded like scientific research is funded?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
yea its wild
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.
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.
1 reply →
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.
1 reply →
> I don't see the point
> Therefore I'm against this
Dude.
> 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.
1 reply →
Open-source ransomware?
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