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 🙏
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.
Came to say this.
Yep, those are the only ones that i trust my name with and on top of that i think you can use your ID to make your signatur even more trustworthy iirc
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…
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.
