Petition to formally recognize open source work as civic service in Germany
26 comments
·November 28, 2025netdevphoenix
huqedato
Agree but... these would be hard and expensive to assess objectively, in particular point b.
londons_explore
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.
asah
??? seems straightforward... among other things, require the applicant to do the work / provide evidence...
denismenace
Would Linux count as a project with corpo sponsors?
whstl
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.
dvtkrlbs
I mean the foundation is still mostly governed by corpo
LoganDark
How do you handle projects where the owner is part of a large community? Maintainers of very important or useful projects should count, right?
checker659
Without open source there would be no code writing LLMs. It is charity of the highest order (to say the least).
lionkor
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.
lionkor
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.
basemi
Not against it but how do you track time spent on it?
clickety_clack
Maybe the good old “lines of code” days will make a comeback?
blenderob
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?
avhception
Nice, signed!
leothetechguy
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.
poszlem
As someone who has worked for the government, I think you at least mistaken or very naive if you think that.
constantcrying
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.
limagnolia
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!
FinnKuhn
Apparantly you can receive up to 840€ per year tax free for it?
avhception
Maybe you are right and an Verein would be a better venue for this. What are your concerns with Ehrenämtern?
em-bee
the point is that it would be easier to have such a verein recognized as being for public benefit.
p-e-w
> 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.
dap
Open-source ransomware?
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"