This is an awesome idea! So basically you can do open source work if you’re between jobs. Keeps your skills, gets you paid and gives back.
I think it only means if you do get paid reasonable amounts for open source work, you don’t have to pay tax on that.
So between jobs it shouldn’t matter since you wouldn’t pay taxes anyway, unless you worked a lot and received a lot of donations. But if you contribute after hours of a regular job, this would ensure you still get the full amount the foss project receives.There is also mention of assistance with administration, which I’m not sure what that entails.
Oh, less great. Let’s one day do the full government paycheck thing. If anyone proposes that I will vote yes on it. We vote for school taxes to make new schools. Why not pay for new programs if we use those in schools too. Am I right? But a tax write off I guess its not bad.
Do crime and get sentenced to 80 hour open source contribution would be awesome
- Crime: Using Microsoft VS code.
- Sentence: 80 hours of hard open source work.
Do I still have to go to jail if I use vs codium
… No one truly use vs coduim.
Microsoft cut marketplace access, which fucked languages support.
I do. You just have to hunt more for the right extension.
- C#: C# by muhammad-sammy
- C++: clangd by llvm-vs-code-extensions
- C++ debugging: CodeLLDB by vadimcn
I assume only German citizens can sign this? I upvoted here if that helps, because it sounds like a great initiative, maybe if this gains traction this can go europe wide?
The difficult part is measuring work done I’m afraid though. For volunteer work as e.g. reading books to kids or cleaning streets it’s relatively easy to see that things are happening, even if some are better/faster than others. Unless you’re going to force people to work in live calls or whatever, or just trust self-reporting, that’s going to be hard, no?
Or do you mean more like subsidies for nonprofits working in open source?
Either way, good initiative, I hope for its success!
In Germany there is a legally recognised form of volunteering called Ehrenamt (honorary office), mostly used by non-profit organisations. It has benefits for taxes, gaining public funding, and such. E.g. if you are the primary caretaker of an elderly family member you can get unemployment benefits without having to look for work, since it is recognised as a public good.
The petition aims to recognise work on Open Source software as such an honorary office.
A Git history would be quite an easy way to show that you are doing something regularly.
Sadly these days people can just tell some LLM to make changes and waste everyone’s time, on top of being fraud in this case
There’s a million easier ways to claim the German unemployment money than that
Which would lead to them being excluded from the project in a short time, I’d wager.
I’m a bit sceptical, especially of governments lagging behind these things. I’m hopeful that this will solve itself or be solved soon though.
I don’t think the government has much to do here. It’s not like if other organizations would have an influence from the government’s side.
Open source orgs are usually NGO, and the big ones will spit garbage pretty quickly.
a git history is easily fabricated. you can freely edit it, remove entries or write into it whatever you want, including impersonating other users and fabricating datetime
While true, a git history is also easily protected against fabrication. Require cryptographically signed commits and prevent contributors from force-pushing to the public repo and you should be good.
I mean, if you try to “scam” the gov, you can clone some codeberg repo to github, rename it, rewrite history to make the commits look like you did everything and then tell the gov “look at how much work I volunteered”. At least in germany, there are currently not enough public workers so many little things go unchecked.
Ah I see, yeah I guess something like that would be possible. On the other hand it would be trivial to prove this happened even in the future as long as the government keeps a unedited copy of this repo.
Open-Source-Software builds the foundations of digital infrastructure in big parts - in administration, economy, science and daily life. Even the current coalition agreement of the Federal Government mentions Open-Source-Software as a fundamental building block for the achievement of digital sovereignty.
However, the work done by thousands of volunteers for this goal is not recognised as volunteering, neither fiscally nor in terms of funding. This imbalance between societal importance and legal status has to be corrected.
Therefore, as an active contributor to Open-Source-Projects, I call for work on Open-Source to be recognised as volunteering for the common good – of equal rank as volunteer work for associations, youth work or ambulance service.
Sure, but why?
Monetary gains, mainly.
You can make tax write-offs for work in an e.V. and also donations. Open source development would then be kind of state sponsored which is nice.
English version. It mentions the reasons
