I think they just meant to point out the petition was available in several languages and tsak was just using one such English versioned link, not to imply that using the main German link also solves mschild's notes.
I.e. it's one thing for a petition to not be on an official government platform/process but it's a completely different type of claim to say it's not even in the country's language when it, of course, is.
I don't think that equating all open source work with volunteering makes sense.
Volunteering is defined by its charitable purpose for a public good, not by the specific skill used.
Let me try an analogy:
A chef who cooks a free meal for a homeless shelter is volunteering. That same chef publishing a recipe online or making a cooking tutorial is sharing knowledge, not volunteering. The act of 'cooking' or 'publishing' is neutral. It becomes volunteering only when the primary, direct, and organised purpose is to serve a charitable cause without expectation of personal gain.
Disclaimer: I have been consistently doing a lot of open source in the last 10 years. I would consider none of that as volunteering.
But the German word for it is "gemeinnützig" which loosely translates to "useful for the commons".
So also things like helping kids with their homework or giving people courses in your hackerspace, repaircafes, reading with others can fall into that.
So while maybe not all software that is open source also is automatically useful for the commons as it is now the definition is way too narrow. If you write software that helps one of the existing recognized causes it is openns source. If you write an open source photoshop or spend days working on software that keeps the world running you don't. But we need the latter people and supporting the former people makes the world a better place.
> So also things like helping kids with their homework or giving people courses in your hackerspace, repaircafes, reading with others can fall into that.
I'm guessing it doesn't count if you are being helped to help kids or give courses, does it? So not only it depends on what it is, it also depends on how it is done.
Open source in itself is not charitable, and many people get paid to contribute to open source projects.
My point is that I agree that some open source projects can count as volunteering, just like some masonry work. But I wouldn't say that "open source" should count as volunteering, just like for masonry.
> FOSS is gemeinnützig, even if the producers are paid.
That's exactly what I question. Let's say I develop an open source firmware specific to hardware I produce. It's not compatible with anything else, it's my proprietary hardware. The hardware is a tamagotchi (you wouldn't consider a tamagotchi "gemeinnützig", would you?). I use tivoisation, such that nobody can flash a different firmware than the one I write. Still the source code of that firmware is open source.
the problem here is where to draw the line. the thing is though, a perfect line can't be drawn. i can still read your code, and learn something from it. so there is some benefit.
the question is how do we measure benefit?
you could also imagine a project that could be of huge benefit, but nobody knows about it because just publishing it on my website or even on github is not enough.
so maybe benefit is the number of people downloading and using the code. few people would use your firmware, so the benefit would be small.
we are already facing this question with small libraries projects that many other projects depend on. which of these libraries deserve or need our support. if you can answer that question you can also decide if a project is of public benefit.
when it comes to officially recognizing projects, the cost of enforcement is also an issue.
it may be unfair that a project like this firmware gets recognized as being of public benefit, but it is also unfair to not recognize other projects that do need the recognition don't get it.
it is not reasonable to reject an idea just because you can construct examples that are not deserving and would exploit a loophole. just like we don't cancel social security benefits just because there are a few bad sheep that are unfairly taking advantage of it.
i find it really frustrating that every good idea is shot down just because some people could benefit unfairly.
That's exactly my point! It's not as simple as "it is open source, therefore it is gemeinnützig". It depends on the project.
Therefore it doesn't make sense to recognise "open source" as "volunteering". What makes sense is to consider "volunteering projects" as "volunteering projects", and the way one decides that is by looking at the project. Open source or not.
But I assume that's already how it works: to qualify as "volunteering", someone in charge has to look at your activity and confirm that it does, indeed, qualify.
I very much hope this doesn't descend into licence wars but I would think all of the BSD, MIT, ISC, hold-harmless, RAND and GNU licences qualified. If that's true and it was understood the public/commons got an outcome, I'd be in favour.
If the code is under restrictive clauses, or gets tokenistic input and the quotient of time and money is spent doing something else, then I think this is a licence to cheapen out contracting rates for-profit.
As a German working with charities, this petition doesn't make any sense/is not specific enough to know what they actually want. There is no such thing as getting an activity recognized as volunteering. You either volunteer for a registered charity, or you don't. Nobody cares what you do for a charity, whether you write code for it or clean the toilets doesn't matter for recognition.
The petition only makes legal sense if it were to ask to extend the set of charitable goals as specified in the Abgabenordnung, but the existing set already allows for FOSS projects as part of e.g. the "national education" category (public code is educative).
And, to be frank, I also don't get the "recognition" part. The tangible benefits of volunteering for a charity are limited; what does it even mean to get recognition for it.
The context here is German law and the specific categories within the law an activity needs to be argued to fit in, not perceived or real benefit to society in a broader sense. "Adult education" is one of these categories, and it is proven to be accepted by German tax authorities for open source work.
(Contrary to intuition, "advancement of science and research" is very hard to get accepted in unless you're a university or at least publish papers in journals. And while the law claims that in theory other purposes could be argued for, in practice tax authorities will simply stick to the list and not make exceptions.)
Yes, and we should make whatever changes are needed to recognize the actual contributions of open source projects to the commons instead of trying to backdoor such projects into recognition as education.
I think that the problem is that "open source" in itself is not volunteering.
Just like "masonry" is not volunteering, even though a mason could volunteer by building an orphanage pro bono. But when they build their own house, it's not volunteering.
I don't even think that being paid for building an orphanage counts as volunteering... does it?
If the thief keeps looting the full house of others sure. Even more so if the thief uses the loot to provide services you rely on and society as a whole has decided to give the thief the right to loot part of everyone's house.
Certain reimbursements/allowances for volunteering are treated favorably for tax purposes if conditions are met, e.g. ehrenamtspauschale (volunteer allowance).
Also, as Gemeinnützig, for tax and for issuing donation receipts.
It could also function as community service hours ordered by a court (sozialstunden).
In addition to tax stuff there's a card you can get in most states, issued by cities/districts based on certain criteria, like doing a certain amount of hours per week of volunteer work, that will give you a discount or free entry to museums, pools, movie theaters, events.. There's listings online of all the institutions and businesses that give a discount.
For this, and for the criminal justice use case, it seems to me that it isn't possible for "work on open source" to receive this kind of formal recognition. Anyone is free to self-certify that they're working on an open-source project headed by, and exclusively contributed to by, themselves.
You'd need to formally recognize open-source projects that the German state approves of, on a case-by-case basis.
And even then you have questions like "If Hans Reiser is sentenced to community service for killing his wife, can he satisfy that by working on reiserfs? How is that different from sentencing him to no punishment?"
the punishment argument makes no sense. it is already a problem if someone volunteers in any capacity and then commits a crime. sometimes community service is not the right punishment.
Community service is not supposed to be a punishment but rather an opportunity to offset wrongs done by doing more good than the average person. If someone was already doing good deeds before then that is not an issue. If anything, courts already consider past good deeds when determining sentencing.
It's obviously not something that is an appropriate remedy for all crimes.
True. It would need to be something associated with a registered non-profit organization/NGO. But isn't that already the case with other types of volunteer work?
Though the petition is about Germany, in the US some entitlement programs come with work requirements that can be satisfied by volunteer work. Given the tech job market and how the US government's labor policies are detrimental to native workers, allowing them to keep their skills sharp through open source work while also satisfying the work requirements of various social programs, it seems like a decent trade-off. This presumes the government and the donors to the politicians that run it don't really want native workers to be unskilled. Their actions indicate the opposite, so that throws a bit of a wrench into things.
the question is, if we as a society want to encourage activities that are for the benefit of everyone.
a sport maybe a hobby. running a sportsclub is volunteer work. writing code for fun is a hobby, publishing and maintaining it for others should be volunteer work.
I don't know if there is the concept of charity organisation in Germany but I feel this is the sort of thing that ought to be limited to registered charities not to be abused/get out of hand.
The intention is to benefit financially. They are not doing it for "volunteering". But I get what you are saying. I am looking at it from a moral perspective.
What work would count as valid open source work though? I assume projects that people use are obvious. But what about ones where you're just throwing up your own projects where they start out with no users or impact? Even though its open source, does it need strategic importance from the get-go? Who decides?
I agree with the goal but unless you create the petition using the official Bundestag website, this is about as useful as a thumbs up on Facebook.
If you make a petition with the official website and it passes they have to deal with it, even if its a rejection.
https://epetitionen.bundestag.de/epet/peteinreichen.html
Furthermore, this petition should be written in German as well...
Like this?
https://www.openpetition.de/petition/online/anerkennung-von-...
Almost, still the wrong website.
I think they just meant to point out the petition was available in several languages and tsak was just using one such English versioned link, not to imply that using the main German link also solves mschild's notes.
I.e. it's one thing for a petition to not be on an official government platform/process but it's a completely different type of claim to say it's not even in the country's language when it, of course, is.
I don't think that equating all open source work with volunteering makes sense.
Volunteering is defined by its charitable purpose for a public good, not by the specific skill used.
Let me try an analogy:
A chef who cooks a free meal for a homeless shelter is volunteering. That same chef publishing a recipe online or making a cooking tutorial is sharing knowledge, not volunteering. The act of 'cooking' or 'publishing' is neutral. It becomes volunteering only when the primary, direct, and organised purpose is to serve a charitable cause without expectation of personal gain.
Disclaimer: I have been consistently doing a lot of open source in the last 10 years. I would consider none of that as volunteering.
But the German word for it is "gemeinnützig" which loosely translates to "useful for the commons".
So also things like helping kids with their homework or giving people courses in your hackerspace, repaircafes, reading with others can fall into that.
So while maybe not all software that is open source also is automatically useful for the commons as it is now the definition is way too narrow. If you write software that helps one of the existing recognized causes it is openns source. If you write an open source photoshop or spend days working on software that keeps the world running you don't. But we need the latter people and supporting the former people makes the world a better place.
> So also things like helping kids with their homework or giving people courses in your hackerspace, repaircafes, reading with others can fall into that.
I'm guessing it doesn't count if you are being helped to help kids or give courses, does it? So not only it depends on what it is, it also depends on how it is done.
Open source in itself is not charitable, and many people get paid to contribute to open source projects.
My point is that I agree that some open source projects can count as volunteering, just like some masonry work. But I wouldn't say that "open source" should count as volunteering, just like for masonry.
those who pay others to develop open source (or free software) would be donating to charity. so it is still volunteering, just indirectly.
also the term "gemeinnützig" is about the end result, not how it is produced. FOSS is gemeinnützig, even if the producers are paid.
> FOSS is gemeinnützig, even if the producers are paid.
That's exactly what I question. Let's say I develop an open source firmware specific to hardware I produce. It's not compatible with anything else, it's my proprietary hardware. The hardware is a tamagotchi (you wouldn't consider a tamagotchi "gemeinnützig", would you?). I use tivoisation, such that nobody can flash a different firmware than the one I write. Still the source code of that firmware is open source.
Is that gemeinnützig?
the problem here is where to draw the line. the thing is though, a perfect line can't be drawn. i can still read your code, and learn something from it. so there is some benefit.
the question is how do we measure benefit?
you could also imagine a project that could be of huge benefit, but nobody knows about it because just publishing it on my website or even on github is not enough.
so maybe benefit is the number of people downloading and using the code. few people would use your firmware, so the benefit would be small.
we are already facing this question with small libraries projects that many other projects depend on. which of these libraries deserve or need our support. if you can answer that question you can also decide if a project is of public benefit.
when it comes to officially recognizing projects, the cost of enforcement is also an issue. it may be unfair that a project like this firmware gets recognized as being of public benefit, but it is also unfair to not recognize other projects that do need the recognition don't get it.
it is not reasonable to reject an idea just because you can construct examples that are not deserving and would exploit a loophole. just like we don't cancel social security benefits just because there are a few bad sheep that are unfairly taking advantage of it.
i find it really frustrating that every good idea is shot down just because some people could benefit unfairly.
That's exactly my point! It's not as simple as "it is open source, therefore it is gemeinnützig". It depends on the project.
Therefore it doesn't make sense to recognise "open source" as "volunteering". What makes sense is to consider "volunteering projects" as "volunteering projects", and the way one decides that is by looking at the project. Open source or not.
But I assume that's already how it works: to qualify as "volunteering", someone in charge has to look at your activity and confirm that it does, indeed, qualify.
but making it not simple raises the cost and thus reduces the value.
evaluation of projects is probably more expensive than the tax income lost from projects that should not be considered of public benefit.
Previous discussion (141 comments) which used the German version of the URL a few months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46078770
I very much hope this doesn't descend into licence wars but I would think all of the BSD, MIT, ISC, hold-harmless, RAND and GNU licences qualified. If that's true and it was understood the public/commons got an outcome, I'd be in favour.
If the code is under restrictive clauses, or gets tokenistic input and the quotient of time and money is spent doing something else, then I think this is a licence to cheapen out contracting rates for-profit.
How does an auditor know?
As a German working with charities, this petition doesn't make any sense/is not specific enough to know what they actually want. There is no such thing as getting an activity recognized as volunteering. You either volunteer for a registered charity, or you don't. Nobody cares what you do for a charity, whether you write code for it or clean the toilets doesn't matter for recognition.
The petition only makes legal sense if it were to ask to extend the set of charitable goals as specified in the Abgabenordnung, but the existing set already allows for FOSS projects as part of e.g. the "national education" category (public code is educative).
And, to be frank, I also don't get the "recognition" part. The tangible benefits of volunteering for a charity are limited; what does it even mean to get recognition for it.
> but the existing set already allows for FOSS projects as part of e.g. the "national education" category (public code is educative)
It may be educative but that is hardly the most significant way in which open source code is beneficial to society.
The context here is German law and the specific categories within the law an activity needs to be argued to fit in, not perceived or real benefit to society in a broader sense. "Adult education" is one of these categories, and it is proven to be accepted by German tax authorities for open source work.
Dependent on the project, other categories might work too. The list is in Abgabenordnung §52 ( https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/ao_1977/__52.html ) / Fiscal Code Section 52 Public benefit purposes ( https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_ao/englisch_ao.p... )
(Contrary to intuition, "advancement of science and research" is very hard to get accepted in unless you're a university or at least publish papers in journals. And while the law claims that in theory other purposes could be argued for, in practice tax authorities will simply stick to the list and not make exceptions.)
Yes, and we should make whatever changes are needed to recognize the actual contributions of open source projects to the commons instead of trying to backdoor such projects into recognition as education.
this is such a great initiative but I fear this may get exploited without proper structure.
Yeah, I don't really want to subsidize people to work on open-source shitcoins for example. The devil is in the details here.
I think that the problem is that "open source" in itself is not volunteering.
Just like "masonry" is not volunteering, even though a mason could volunteer by building an orphanage pro bono. But when they build their own house, it's not volunteering.
I don't even think that being paid for building an orphanage counts as volunteering... does it?
Subsidize?
What? How are you subsidizing anything when it's just recognized as volunteering?
You can at most put that on your Einkommensteuererklärung for a deduction on taxes...
Calling that's subsidizing, idk man, feels massively overblown?
And the Steueramt would have to agree with your statement, which I doubt it would for 99.9% of software.
The exploit-ability of this seems severely overstated here, but I'm not a lawyer so maybe y'all know something I dont
Tax breaks are very much subsidies.
A thief only looting half your house is a subsidy.
If the thief keeps looting the full house of others sure. Even more so if the thief uses the loot to provide services you rely on and society as a whole has decided to give the thief the right to loot part of everyone's house.
What does it mean for volunteering to be "recognized" in Germany?
Certain reimbursements/allowances for volunteering are treated favorably for tax purposes if conditions are met, e.g. ehrenamtspauschale (volunteer allowance).
Also, as Gemeinnützig, for tax and for issuing donation receipts.
It could also function as community service hours ordered by a court (sozialstunden).
Stuff like that.
In addition to tax stuff there's a card you can get in most states, issued by cities/districts based on certain criteria, like doing a certain amount of hours per week of volunteer work, that will give you a discount or free entry to museums, pools, movie theaters, events.. There's listings online of all the institutions and businesses that give a discount.
For this, and for the criminal justice use case, it seems to me that it isn't possible for "work on open source" to receive this kind of formal recognition. Anyone is free to self-certify that they're working on an open-source project headed by, and exclusively contributed to by, themselves.
You'd need to formally recognize open-source projects that the German state approves of, on a case-by-case basis.
And even then you have questions like "If Hans Reiser is sentenced to community service for killing his wife, can he satisfy that by working on reiserfs? How is that different from sentencing him to no punishment?"
the punishment argument makes no sense. it is already a problem if someone volunteers in any capacity and then commits a crime. sometimes community service is not the right punishment.
Community service is not supposed to be a punishment but rather an opportunity to offset wrongs done by doing more good than the average person. If someone was already doing good deeds before then that is not an issue. If anything, courts already consider past good deeds when determining sentencing.
It's obviously not something that is an appropriate remedy for all crimes.
True. It would need to be something associated with a registered non-profit organization/NGO. But isn't that already the case with other types of volunteer work?
But in that case, what is this petition hoping to achieve?
Maybe this would have helped with something like Mastodon losing non-profit status? https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/04/mastodon-forms-new-u.s...
Though the petition is about Germany, in the US some entitlement programs come with work requirements that can be satisfied by volunteer work. Given the tech job market and how the US government's labor policies are detrimental to native workers, allowing them to keep their skills sharp through open source work while also satisfying the work requirements of various social programs, it seems like a decent trade-off. This presumes the government and the donors to the politicians that run it don't really want native workers to be unskilled. Their actions indicate the opposite, so that throws a bit of a wrench into things.
Tax exempts (I'm not a German, but I was curious about the same and this is what ChatGPT told me :) )
> Compensations could be paid tax-exempt
I think this is the real killer feature here. Software companies could save money by simply open-sourcing parts of their software.
Interesting.
Similarly R&D tax incentives could be made to only apply if the R&D is publically available (for study, and any use)
It's ok to have a hobby. Not everything needs to be minmaxed to extract the maximum amount of money from the system.
the question is, if we as a society want to encourage activities that are for the benefit of everyone.
a sport maybe a hobby. running a sportsclub is volunteer work. writing code for fun is a hobby, publishing and maintaining it for others should be volunteer work.
As others have said, this needs to be addressed to the federal government and be in German.
It also needs to specify which kind of open source work is being done and for what ends.
The other problem is that if everyone works for free then most of us can't pay our bills.
I don't know if there is the concept of charity organisation in Germany but I feel this is the sort of thing that ought to be limited to registered charities not to be abused/get out of hand.
Big charities can be some of the worst for it while wee ones struggle to get off the ground with the red tape.
Many of my friends wouldn't qualify for this. They are either doing it as a hobby or to show the projects as their resume helpers.
Why would that disqualify them? Those are also the reasons that people volunteer in soup kitchens.
The intention is to benefit financially. They are not doing it for "volunteering". But I get what you are saying. I am looking at it from a moral perspective.
You can already start a non profit in almost every country. If you're serious and at it for a while and have some structure.
On an individual basis I don't think giving tax breaks to anyone with a chatGPT tab open makes sense.
What work would count as valid open source work though? I assume projects that people use are obvious. But what about ones where you're just throwing up your own projects where they start out with no users or impact? Even though its open source, does it need strategic importance from the get-go? Who decides?