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Petition for Recognition of Work on Open-Source as Volunteering in Germany

https://www.openpetition.de/petition/online/recognition-of-work-on-open-source-as-volunteering-in-germany
153•numeri•2h ago

Comments

mschild•1h ago
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

tsak•40m ago
Furthermore, this petition should be written in German as well...
stonogo•28m ago
Like this?

https://www.openpetition.de/petition/online/anerkennung-von-...

thaumasiotes•1h ago
What does it mean for volunteering to be "recognized" in Germany?
kkarpkkarp•1h ago
Tax exempts (I'm not a German, but I was curious about the same and this is what ChatGPT told me :) )
guessmyname•1h ago
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.

zeeZ•31m ago
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.
thaumasiotes•17m ago
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?"

Mountain_Skies•13m ago
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?
thaumasiotes•9m ago
But in that case, what is this petition hoping to achieve?
Mountain_Skies•15m ago
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.
phendrenad2•51m ago
> 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.

andyferris•36m ago
Interesting.

Similarly R&D tax incentives could be made to only apply if the R&D is publically available (for study, and any use)

vasco•49m ago
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.

ggm•48m ago
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?

dhruv3006•33m ago
this is such a great initiative but I fear this may get exploited without proper structure.
presentation•5m ago
Yeah, I don't really want to subsidize people to work on open-source shitcoins for example. The devil is in the details here.
on_the_train•30m ago
It's ok to have a hobby. Not everything needs to be minmaxed to extract the maximum amount of money from the system.
Uptrenda•27m ago
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?
zamadatix•24m ago
Previous discussion (141 comments) which used the German version of the URL a few months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46078770
system2•12m ago
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.

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Petition for Recognition of Work on Open-Source as Volunteering in Germany

https://www.openpetition.de/petition/online/recognition-of-work-on-open-source-as-volunteering-in...
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