Comment by littlecranky67
3 hours ago
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."
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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.