If you make a petition with the official website and it passes they have to deal with it, even if its a rejection.
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.
So also things like helping kids with their homework or giving people courses in your hackerspace, repaircafes, reading with others can fall into that.
So while maybe not all software that is open source also is automatically useful for the commons as it is now the definition is way too narrow. If you write software that helps one of the existing recognized causes it is openns source. If you write an open source photoshop or spend days working on software that keeps the world running you don't. But we need the latter people and supporting the former people makes the world a better place.
I'm guessing it doesn't count if you are being helped to help kids or give courses, does it? So not only it depends on what it is, it also depends on how it is done.
Open source in itself is not charitable, and many people get paid to contribute to open source projects.
My point is that I agree that some open source projects can count as volunteering, just like some masonry work. But I wouldn't say that "open source" should count as volunteering, just like for masonry.
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.
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?"
I think this is the real killer feature here. Software companies could save money by simply open-sourcing parts of their software.
Similarly R&D tax incentives could be made to only apply if the R&D is publically available (for study, and any use)
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?
The petition only makes legal sense if it were to ask to extend the set of charitable goals as specified in the Abgabenordnung, but the existing set already allows for FOSS projects as part of e.g. the "national education" category (public code is educative).
And, to be frank, I also don't get the "recognition" part. The tangible benefits of volunteering for a charity are limited; what does it even mean to get recognition for it.
It may be educative but that is hardly the most significant way in which open source code is beneficial to society.
Dependent on the project, other categories might work too. The list is in Abgabenordnung §52 ( https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/ao_1977/__52.html ) / Fiscal Code Section 52 Public benefit purposes ( https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_ao/englisch_ao.p... )
(Contrary to intuition, "advancement of science and research" is very hard to get accepted in unless you're a university or at least publish papers in journals. And while the law claims that in theory other purposes could be argued for, in practice tax authorities will simply stick to the list and not make exceptions.)
Just like "masonry" is not volunteering, even though a mason could volunteer by building an orphanage pro bono. But when they build their own house, it's not volunteering.
I don't even think that being paid for building an orphanage counts as volunteering... does it?
What? How are you subsidizing anything when it's just recognized as volunteering?
You can at most put that on your Einkommensteuererklärung for a deduction on taxes...
Calling that's subsidizing, idk man, feels massively overblown?
And the Steueramt would have to agree with your statement, which I doubt it would for 99.9% of software.
The exploit-ability of this seems severely overstated here, but I'm not a lawyer so maybe y'all know something I dont
a sport maybe a hobby. running a sportsclub is volunteer work. writing code for fun is a hobby, publishing and maintaining it for others should be volunteer work.
It also needs to specify which kind of open source work is being done and for what ends.
The other problem is that if everyone works for free then most of us can't pay our bills.
On an individual basis I don't think giving tax breaks to anyone with a chatGPT tab open makes sense.
