8 ms·
Petition to formally recognize open source work as civic service in Germany
- avhception 11mo agoNice, signed!
- leothetechguy 11mo agoI 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 11mo agoAs someone who has worked for the government, I think you at least mistaken or very naive if you think that.
- checker659 11mo agoWithout open source there would be no code writing LLMs. It is charity of the highest order (to say the least).
- netdevphoenix 11mo agoGreat 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"
- huqedato 11mo agoAgree but... these would be hard and expensive to assess objectively, in particular point b.
- asah 11mo ago??? seems straightforward... among other things, require the applicant to do the work / provide evidence...
- londons_explore 11mo agoSome 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.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- threeducks 11mo ago> all projects with over 100 GitHub stars or some similar metric. I think it would be difficult to come up with a good metric. For example, it should not be based on some easily faked number governed by a foreign company.
- LtWorf 11mo ago> all projects with over 100 GitHub stars Lol, they have been on sale online since forever, because investors apparently can be conned into thinking they have some value.
- Aurornis 11mo agoGitHub stars would be gamed immediately. You can already buy GitHub stars by the hundreds from spam services. A better solution would be to require a written proposal which gets reviewed by someone who assesses against some criteria such as project age and other factors. Don’t make it too hard, but make it enough to stop the scheming individuals who think they’re going to start their own GitHub repo, set Claude Code loose in it once a week, and call it civil service.
- darkmighty 11mo agoDoes it need to be objective though? I think a vague list of criteria including "The project must benefit a community", or "The project must not be made solely for the benefit of their employer", and have someone review the proposal should be enough.
- denismenace 11mo agoWould Linux count as a project with corpo sponsors?
- whstl 11mo agoYeah, 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 11mo agoI mean the foundation is still mostly governed by corpo
- RobotToaster 11mo agoIsn't that true for the linux foundation?
- _cenw 11mo agoTo a degree. But the corporate interest is spread across enough organisations that it's much harder for the Linux kernel to reject a patch solely because it's good for business, whereas a lot of corporate open source projects - even those with an OSI approved license - will actively refuse to merge code that competes with their commercial offering or simply isn't submitted by a customer. Hashicorp already operated like this long before they switched to BSL. Unfortunately having a project owned by a foundation isn't a good indicator either, because I know of at least one Apache project where the entire membership is one company, the CEO is the project chair and code is sometimes just dropped into repos in one huge commit.
- Aurornis 11mo agoI think the anti-corporate angle is a bit extreme as it would rule out a large number of projects that are widely used. If the project is truly open source and widely used by the community it shouldn’t matter if it is or was associated with a corporation. Contributing to it helps the public who use that project too.
- LoganDark 11mo agoHow do you handle projects where the owner is part of a large community? Maintainers of very important or useful projects should count, right?
- sReinwald 11mo agoI think point a) is actually backwards and potentially counterproductive to the petition's stated goals. The petition explicitly highlights maintainer burnout and the "unausgewogene Verantwortungslast" (unbalanced responsibility burden) as core problems. Excluding project owners/maintainers from recognition would exclude precisely the people carrying the heaviest load – the ones triaging issues at 2am, reviewing PRs, making architectural decisions, and bearing the psychological weight of knowing critical infrastructure depends on their continued engagement. The XZ Utils incident is instructive here: the attack vector was specifically a burned-out solo maintainer who was socially engineered because he was overwhelmed and desperate for help. If anything, recognition and support structures should prioritize these individuals, not exclude them. Your concern about "pet projects with no impact" is valid, but the solution isn't to exclude owners categorically – it's to define impact criteria. A threshold based on adoption metrics, dependency chains, or inclusion in public infrastructure would filter out portfolio projects without penalizing the people doing the most critical work. Point c) also seems problematic for similar reasons: much of maintainer work isn't "merged contributions" – it's code review, issue triage, documentation, community management, security response. Under your criteria, the person who reviews and merges 500 PRs per year while writing none themselves would receive no recognition. The petition is trying to address a structural problem where society extracts massive value from unpaid labor while providing no support structures. Excluding the most burdened participants seems like it would perpetuate rather than solve that problem.
- Aurornis 11mo agoI think limiting the recognition to repos that reach some level of significance would solve a lot of the problems. It would anger the smaller projects and fresh projects, but it’s the only way to avoid having people create hobby projects or portfolio-filling slop repos and try to claim it as civic service. This reminds me of a trend a few years ago when I started seeing a lot of applications from people who listed themselves as founders of a charitable foundation on their resume. I felt impressed the first time I saw it but got suspicious after the 3rd or 4th. Then I realized that it doesn’t take much work to incorporate a charitable foundation and list your family and friends as board members. The hard work was actually raising and disbursing money. When I started asking for details about how much the organization did I got wishy-washy answers and a lot of changing the subject. This is why details matter and it’s not as simple as giving everyone who claims an achievement the same reward, however small the reward may be.
- withinboredom 11mo ago> if your contribution is not merged in, it should not count as "work done" I highly disagree with this. Sometimes someone has to do the work to discover that isn't the work that should be done. As an example, last week, I got in a fight with the Go scheduler: https://github.com/php/frankenphp/pull/2016 https://github.com/php/frankenphp/pull/2016 -- in the end, we were able to find the one-liner that is a happy-medium. I didn't open that PR, but I did the work; if that makes sense.
- Aurornis 11mo agoIn a program like this you can’t optimize for the assumption that every participant is acting in good faith and contributing good work even if it’s not accepted. If a program incentivizes opening PRs even if they’re not accepted, the result will be a lot of maintainer spam from people opening useless PRs. This isn’t a personal hypothetical, it’s what we observe any time programs try to incentivize open source work. See the Hacktoberfest drama of years past where the promise of a T-shirt led to spam PRs across GitHub https://joel.net/how-one-guy-ruined-hacktoberfest2020-drama https://joel.net/how-one-guy-ruined-hacktoberfest2020-drama
- withinboredom 11mo agoAt that point, you tackle abuse, which is a separate topic altogether.
- Aurornis 11mo agoIt’s not a separate topic. You have to structure the program so that abuse is disincentivized from the start. In the T-shirt example if you left the program as-is but then decided that tackling abuse is a separate topic, think about what that would look like: Every maintainer would now not only have to read and close the spam PRs, they’d have to go file an abuse report for every single one of them. Now you’ve put even more work on the maintainers and created an additional burden of reviewing reports, all without clarifying the program to discourage abuse from the start. This is why it’s necessary to structure a program clearly such that abuse-level or low effort inputs can’t easily claim the rewards.
- Aurornis 11mo agoAny time you introduce an explicit incentive, however small, to open source work the unintended consequences can become a problem. The Hacktoberfest incident is a good example: The program offered a T-shirt to people who had a PR accepted. The result was tens of thousands of useless PRs across open source repos and maintainers begging for the program to stop so they could stop dealing with useless PRs. https://joel.net/how-one-guy-ruined-hacktoberfest2020-drama https://joel.net/how-one-guy-ruined-hacktoberfest2020-drama In a situation like this you can’t assume that the set of people and the type of work being submitted will remain the same as before the incentive appears.
- retrac 11mo agoAll my silly pet projects which are otherwise quite useless, were nonetheless very useful as didactic exercises.
- Aurornis 11mo agoUseful for you and your personal career growth, yes. Important civic service that should be recognized, no.
- retrac 11mo agoI must completely misunderstand the purpose of the German system of conscription. I thought the point was to train the reserve populace in relevant skills to defence and public functioning, not just to extract labour.
- Aurornis 11mo ago> I must completely misunderstand the purpose of the German system of conscription Conscription would be compulsory enlistment for service. That is, the government selects you for the work and you have no choice but to do it. It’s a rarely used practice almost exclusively employed for military service. The topic of this petition is civic service. Civic service is volunteer work done for the good of the community. Civic service work needs to have a direct public benefit, not simply claiming that it makes you personally better educated.
- retrac 11mo agoSorry you're right I was mistaking this with the civil service that was offered as an alternative to military conscription.
- vachina 11mo agoTerrible deal for the German taxpayer. Excellent deal for Amazon et. al.
- lionkor 11mo agoHow so?
- micromacrofoot 11mo agoBig corporations benefit from OSS that Germany would now paying to write... exacerbates a preexisting power imbalance with OSS, similar reason some projects have moved to AGPL
- lionkor 11mo agoThe government does not give money for this, that is not the point and is not how this works at all. This would simply make it easier to get compensated for open source contributions (tax-free, to a certain small number).
- micromacrofoot 11mo agoreducing taxes is giving money
- lionkor 11mo agoNot at the scale of Aufwandsentschaedigung (well under 1000 bucks a month before tax)
- micromacrofoot 11mo agoSo they're not losing any tax revenue by doing this?
- lionkor 11mo agoThis 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 11mo agoTo 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.
- weinzierl 11mo agoAn e.V. in Germany mostly makes sense if it is also charitable. You will have a hard time justifying that for an arbitrary FOSS project. There are about 100 categories that are predeclared as potentially charitable and you have to fit into one of them. Most of them are weirdly specific like homing-pigeon breeding or model plane flying. The only two that are broader and remotely realistic candidates for a FOSS project are religion and education. If you don't want to start a cult you are left with education. That is as how organizations like Chaos Computer Club do it. Education means education for the general public though and it is not enough if you offer occasional courses for a niche topic. It has to be something that potentially interests everyone. The tax office is checking that and it is on you proof it to them regularly.
- rendx 11mo ago
- constantcrying 11mo agoWhat 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.
- avhception 11mo agoMaybe you are right and an Verein would be a better venue for this. What are your concerns with Ehrenämtern?
- em-bee 11mo agothe point is that it would be easier to have such a verein recognized as being for public benefit.
- constantcrying 11mo agoWould it? E.g. Codeberg is gemeinnützige (for the public benefit) are there any examples of a Verein being denied gemeinnützigkeit based on the fact that open source development is not a recognized Ehrenamt?
- em-bee 11mo agoi suppose it depends on how they fund themselves. for example, i have a project that i am funding myself entirely with commercial activity. would be nice if i could make tax free donations to myself for the time i work on the project.
- p-e-w 11mo ago> 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.
- blenderob 11mo agoAre 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?
- hwh 11mo agoit is, but the threshold for mandated debate is high. So high in fact that this doesn't really happen at all. Usually, petitions like this are mostly a PR vehicle. A lot of them is also a bit underspecific in what exactly they are requesting of what political entity.
- basemi 11mo agoNot against it but how do you track time spent on it?
- clickety_clack 11mo agoMaybe the good old “lines of code” days will make a comeback?
- barbazoo 11mo agoHuman written or also AI?
- hagbard_c 11mo agoLines of code are easily produced using coding models. OK, so let's add another criterium, 'lines of code produced by a human'. Now some form of arbitrage is needed to discern vibe-coded lines from human-coded ones.
- aequitas 11mo agohttps://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
- layer8 11mo agoWith a clock?
- whstl 11mo agoIn Germany, as I understand it, civic service can only be performed if you are "hired" by a recognized host organization, and host organizations must be non-profit, public, or community-benefit organizations. So most certainly wouldn't be just "committing to Github projects from home", it would require a host organization to actually the legwork and get itself approved as non-profit but also as a host of civic services. And knowing German bureaucracy, the above is not easy. ;)
- juliangmp 11mo agoI'm no lawyer or expert on these matters, but I know that Codeberg e.V. is considered charitable, so the people hired by Codeberg should be eligible for this already, I think. I don't know if KDE e.V. is also considered charitable, but I assume they are, and they also hire developers. I'd be curious to learn how the tax reports in these situations work.
- rendx 11mo agohttps://techcultivation.org https://techcultivation.org
- oytis 11mo agoBy the headline I thought they were talking about allowing one to contribute to OS instead of the newly introduced military service, that would be too good of a deal to be true.
- carlosjobim 11mo agoLogic of open source: 1. I don't want to take responsibility for anything I do. 2. That's why I give away my work for free, so nobody has any right to complain. And so I don't have to be embarrassed of any shortcomings. 3. Some people take all my work and give me nothing back. 4. Now I get really angry that I didn't get anything for all the work I did! 5. So I demand that the government steps in and takes responsibility! And that they give me money and tax benefits!
- beanjuiceII 11mo agoyea its wild
- sampullman 11mo agoI don't think 1, 2, and 4 apply to many high profile open source projects.
- hagbard_c 11mo agoThis message was brought to you by means of the Linux kernel (free software) running the GNU user space tools (free software) and the Nginx web server (free software) serving as a reverse proxy for the HN site (more or less free software, at least older versions are available). All that work, for free, to allow you to complain about people writing free software. Entitled, you are.
- carlosjobim 11mo agoDon't even get me started on Linux. No IT project has done more damage to the Internet than Linux, which has wasted billions of dollars worth of time for users and businesses of all kind. All because the allure of "free". People used to be able to create and publish their own websites using only graphical interface software on their own home computers. Where did that go? Now you have to be a Linux system administrator to do the most basic online publishing, unless you want to be within somebody else's ecosystem. How I wish that OS X would have won against Linux for servers, and normal people would have better access to express themselves online. But here I am, stuck with administering Linux servers...
- 11mo ago
- littlecranky67 11mo agoI 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.
- tovej 11mo agoOpen source is defined by the Open Source Initiative: https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd At least it should be. I'm not sure what definition this petition would use.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- _cenw 11mo agoThe 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.
- fsflover 11mo ago> the OSI definition only deals with the way software is developed and distributed, not how software contributes to the common good So it should be the FSF's definition of free software, https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
- _cenw 11mo agoRMS famously had no problem with dual licensing. The definition should. None of the GPL licenses protect from bad stewardship focused on maintaining commercial viability of some product either.
- thomas-shelby 11mo ago[dead]
- pessimizer 11mo agoThe license has to be central to something like this, and it has got to be copyleft and/or even some sort of nationalist German-MIT license that only grants permission to German citizens and companies. You can't let the German taxpayer get exploited for the benefit of foreign corporations. The "spirit of open source" is not real. If you think that the only real gift is MIT-style permissively licensed stuff, you should be proud not to be recognized by the government. You should ask for no credit and no reward. Christmas gifts you buy for someone are taxed, and are not considered charitable contributions. Otherwise, it is a great and vital idea. "Open source" is just not specific enough. It may even exclude GPL.
- lionkor 11mo agoHow does the tax-payer lose money on this? Is there money from the government involved here?
- kevin-scott21 11mo ago[dead]
- amelius 11mo agoShouldn't open source be funded like scientific research is funded?
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- nwellnhof 11mo agoWhy not petition to change § 52 AO directly? I made such a petition a couple of years ago but didn't get around to promote it: https://www.openpetition.de/petition/online/anerkennung-der-foerderung-von-open-source-software-als-gemeinnuetzig https://www.openpetition.de/petition/online/anerkennung-der-...
- mkoubaa 11mo agoAlso waiting for a prolific open source contributor to be canonized as a saint.
- firefax 11mo agoI'm a big fan of Germany -- my most enjoyable vacation was riding around DE on DB, I've done some German language classes and read extensively about it's history. (I think people hyperfocus on WWII out of morbid curiosity and skip over the atrocities of the Stasi.) The last time I was there, I had the poor luck to schedule my train out of Berlin as a protest was being held. People were super polite, parting ways for me then going back to their thing. One of the leaders must have heard through the grapevine I was a travelling academic and tried to put me on the spot if I "supported" the protest. (They were unhappy about the Trans Pacific Partnership). I told him I study privacy, not law nor economics so I don't feel qualified to comment on a trade agreement, but I certainly support their right to express their opinion. And with that, what very little hostility I'd encountered that day vanished, and I went off to eat my currywurst, drink my beer, and watch some videos on my laptop while waiting for my train. I'm going to pause and say maybe this is the kind of policy question we should leave to the citizens of said country... it seems to center around extremely technical terms in a legal system a lot of us on (overwhelmingly American) HN have very little understanding. Germany has a history of being extremely supportive of open source -- when I was exploring the clubs, the only black shirt I had was one with a giant Firefox logo, and I got a lot of postive feedback and even let past the line at one place, so I'd be curious what German citizens have to say on the matter before forming my own opinion.
- port11 11mo agoGermany is a wonderful place — and aside from a few racist remarks when I grew my beard — I'm forever grateful for what that country did to my mental health, career, and future. Indeed it should be up to Germans to decide how to handle this, but given their general respect for The Common Good, I'm positive about such a law. Godspeed!
- firefax 11mo agoSomeone from DE pointed out elsewhere in the thread this could be used to avoid paying ppl properly -- classify someone as "volunteering" to be paid a paltry sum with no pension contributions etc to work on tools that benefit for profit corps. So definitely want to be mindful you don't open the door to tax avoidance and exploitation under the guise of charity. I know very little about the EU, but I've worked with nonprofits a lot in the USA and there's a lot that are basically corporate cut outs used to lobbying that's a stretch to say is in the public interest.
- djij 11mo agoPetition to pretend that we don’t live in a global dystopia and we can contribute to a global commons without it being co-opted by transnational corporations that will eventually harvest all our emotional attachments
- smokel 11mo agoIt's worse, gravity is constantly trying to kill us, and the sun bombards us with lethal radiation.
- desman 11mo agoThe main point they are making is that open source software is creating public good/value and needs to be recognized as a civic service. The problem I have with it is that in the majority of cases it doesn't create any value at all, there are plenty of open source projects that are not illegal but net harmful for public interest. Knowing how Germans usually distinguish good from evil (paperwork/bureaucracy/official review and certifications), this will likely end up with yet another verse of Vogon poetry one would need to engage with to get a tax break. The recipients of benefits will likely be those who will go for the trouble of proving that they are "good open source". It is highly likely that actual net benefactors of society will not condescend to do this paperwork and. end up not getting the proposed benefits.
- martin-t 11mo agoWe shouldn't shoot down good ideas just because a bad implementation is possible.
- skeeter2020 11mo agois that what the GP is doing? I read their comment as shooting down a bad implementation until a good one is presented.
- hollow-moe 11mo agowhat kind of projects are you calling "bad open source being net harmful for public interest" ?
- ghssds 11mo agoAny project providing privacy or free speech to people.
- chairmansteve 11mo agoThe German government should set up institutions that employ programmers to work on open source programs that benefit the German people. Just like they pay for research programs.
- rurban 11mo agoI am formally recognized as civic service (Ehrenamt), because I lead a noncommercial table tennis club. The benefits I get are 1-2€ deductions on cinema visits and some other cultural events. Nothing else. It's not really worth the trouble to get such a document.
- robotburrito 11mo agoThey should instead recognize free software.