Petition for Recognition of Work on Open-Source as Volunteering in Germany
openpetition.de
openpetition.de
If you make a petition with the official website and it passes they have to deal with it, even if its a rejection.
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.
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.
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.
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.
also the term "gemeinnützig" is about the end result, not how it is produced. 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 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.
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.
evaluation of projects is probably more expensive than the tax income lost from projects that should not be considered of public benefit.
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.
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?"
It's obviously not something that is an appropriate remedy for all crimes.
I think this is the real killer feature here. Software companies could save money by simply open-sourcing parts of their software.
Similarly R&D tax incentives could be made to only apply if the R&D is publically available (for study, and any use)
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?
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.
It may be educative but that is hardly the most significant way in which open source code is beneficial to society.
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.)
It would also be a plain and simple category error. The legal code is not concerned with the how. It doesn't list actions but abstract pursuits, outcomes. "Open source development" simply doesn't fit there. My previous comparison was "cleaning toilets". It can equally be part of a charitable activity beneficial to the public if you do it for a charity, yet there would be no point in adding it to a closed list.
By the way, it would still require the project to register as a German charity, file reports, etc.
Plenty of questions, zero answers in the petition. The petition doesn't state what their goal is at all. What is the actionable item, what is the request, and from whom? Even a prayer is usually more specific.
To me, it doesn't read at all like the petition is advocating to add "open source" to the list of charity goals, since that has nothing to do with "getting volunteering recognized" (whatever that may refer to). Charities work with money, which is what the law is about after all -- it's a Tax Code! All it deals with is money. Unless you deal with actual financial flows, you don't need to respect any of that, and you're free to do whatever! "Volunteering" has very little to do with money.
And I say that as somebody who has almost exclusively worked for and with charities, in both paid positions and as volunteer, for the past decades. I really don't know what this is advocating for. I get a lot of "recognition" for my contributions to open source projects, both finanicially and non-financially, and so do others that I know who contribute to open source.
It's like petitioning for "rainbow cotton candy". Sounds nice -- who would object to that! But: Who? What? Where? How?
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?
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
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.
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.
On an individual basis I don't think giving tax breaks to anyone with a chatGPT tab open makes sense.