15 comments

  • mschild an hour ago

    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

  • ggm 23 minutes ago

    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?

  • dhruv3006 8 minutes ago

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

  • Uptrenda 2 minutes ago

    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?

  • vasco 24 minutes ago

    You can already start a non profit in almost every country. If you're serious and at it for a while and have some structure.

    On an individual basis I don't think giving tax breaks to anyone with a chatGPT tab open makes sense.

  • thaumasiotes an hour ago

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

    • zeeZ 5 minutes ago

      In addition to tax stuff there's a card you can get in most states, issued by cities/districts based on certain criteria, like doing a certain amount of hours per week of volunteer work, that will give you a discount or free entry to museums, pools, movie theaters, events.. There's listings online of all the institutions and businesses that give a discount.

    • guessmyname 36 minutes ago

      Certain reimbursements/allowances for volunteering are treated favorably for tax purposes if conditions are met, e.g. ehrenamtspauschale (volunteer allowance).

      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.

    • kkarpkkarp 37 minutes ago

      Tax exempts (I'm not a German, but I was curious about the same and this is what ChatGPT told me :) )

  • phendrenad2 25 minutes ago

    > 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.

    • andyferris 10 minutes ago

      Interesting.

      Similarly R&D tax incentives could be made to only apply if the R&D is publically available (for study, and any use)

  • on_the_train 5 minutes ago

    It's ok to have a hobby. Not everything needs to be minmaxed to extract the maximum amount of money from the system.