A lot of German people contribute to open-source projects in their spare time – unpaid, often for years. And yet, under German tax law, this work is not recognized as volunteer work (Ehrenamt) – unlike club work, youth work, or emergency services.

A petition to the German Bundestag’s petitions committee is calling for equal treatment.

Concretely, this would mean:

  • Tax-free expense allowances (Ehrenamts-/Übungsleiterpauschale)

  • Easier non-profit status (§52 AO) for open-source projects

  • Better liability protection for maintainers (analogous to §31a BGB)

  • Legally secure donation receipts and cost reimbursement

Petition: https://www.openpetition.de/petition/online/anerkennung-von-open-source-arbeit-als-ehrenamt-in-deutschland

Please sign it. You can give 5 minutes of your time for your country.

  • mifa201@lemmy.eco.br
    0·
    3 days ago

    If it were a couple of years ago I would have signed it. But nowadays, where thousands of “contributors” are just submitting AI slop everywhere, and perceived 99.9% of new projects are purely vibe-coded… no thanks. The nice thing of volunteer work is the human aspect of it, what is unfortunately no longer guaranteed. I don’t want my tax contributions being burned into LLM tokens.

  • sit@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    3 days ago

    OPs link (openpetitions.org) only asks for my full name and email address.

    Im not firm in this topic but I doubt it’s enough to be a valid signing…

    I would expect: Name, birthdate, address, maybe even ID-number.

    With only a name I could ask ai to generate 30000 statistically likely German names + individual Mail addresses…