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

164

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

3 hours agoby mschild

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.

1 hour agoby palata

Previous discussion (141 comments) which used the German version of the URL a few months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46078770

2 hours agoby zamadatix

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?

2 hours agoby ggm

this is such a great initiative but I fear this may get exploited without proper structure.

2 hours agoby dhruv3006

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.

1 hour agoby mytailorisrich

What does it mean for volunteering to be "recognized" in Germany?

3 hours agoby thaumasiotes

> 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.

3 hours agoby phendrenad2

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?