Germans are great. Especially when they do nice things.
A lot of German people contribute to open-source projects in their spare time – unpaid, often for years. And yet, under Germany’s 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 open source maintainers (analogous to §31a BGB)
🔵 Legally secure donation receipts and cost reimbursement
This would be a huge boost to the open source community.
Please sign it. It only takes 2 minutes.
If you’re not in Germany, sharing it with people who are would still help a lot.
Thank you 🙏
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.
Petitions for the German government should be filed via the official site, not some third party site: https://epetitionen.bundestag.de/
To OP or others, please re-post if you’ll do it through epetitionen.bundestag.de!
Anyone know if this applies the UK, lately I keep seeing their websites rather than parliament.
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…
