There are usually strict requirements and checks on public services, so you can't just declare everything open source and gain the benefits. Additionally, paying a wage seems to be forbidden, only covering a certain amount of expenses, like travel costs, or I guess server-costs, is allowed. So you would need a very creative company to somehow convince people to work for them with this.

Open source is defined by the Open Source Initiative: https://opensource.org/osd

At least it should be. I'm not sure what definition this petition would use.

I think point a) is actually backwards and potentially counterproductive to the petition's stated goals.

The petition explicitly highlights maintainer burnout and the "unausgewogene Verantwortungslast" (unbalanced responsibility burden) as core problems. Excluding project owners/maintainers from recognition would exclude precisely the people carrying the heaviest load – the ones triaging issues at 2am, reviewing PRs, making architectural decisions, and bearing the psychological weight of knowing critical infrastructure depends on their continued engagement.

The XZ Utils incident is instructive here: the attack vector was specifically a burned-out solo maintainer who was socially engineered because he was overwhelmed and desperate for help. If anything, recognition and support structures should prioritize these individuals, not exclude them. Your concern about "pet projects with no impact" is valid, but the solution isn't to exclude owners categorically – it's to define impact criteria. A threshold based on adoption metrics, dependency chains, or inclusion in public infrastructure would filter out portfolio projects without penalizing the people doing the most critical work.

Point c) also seems problematic for similar reasons: much of maintainer work isn't "merged contributions" – it's code review, issue triage, documentation, community management, security response. Under your criteria, the person who reviews and merges 500 PRs per year while writing none themselves would receive no recognition.

The petition is trying to address a structural problem where society extracts massive value from unpaid labor while providing no support structures. Excluding the most burdened participants seems like it would perpetuate rather than solve that problem.

Agree but... these would be hard and expensive to assess objectively, in particular point b.

Would Linux count as a project with corpo sponsors?

How do you handle projects where the owner is part of a large community? Maintainers of very important or useful projects should count, right?

To add some details actually; we were concerned about three major points:

1. The project would deal with user's data to some degree

2. The project was going to "annoy" an existing, much larger, project who would have likely tried to take some legal action to keep their "place at the top"

3. The project was going to both a) need to generate funds (and pay core developers), and b) be guaranteed to generate funds, based on our experience. However, we did not want to register a company as not having a company complicate things was one of the central goals of the split from the larger project. Try paying people a couple hundred bucks (less than minimum wage, more like Aufwandsentschaedigung) without having to jump through various hoops and without doing it illegally.

I'm no lawyer or expert on these matters, but I know that Codeberg e.V. is considered charitable, so the people hired by Codeberg should be eligible for this already, I think.

I don't know if KDE e.V. is also considered charitable, but I assume they are, and they also hire developers. I'd be curious to learn how the tax reports in these situations work.

Maybe the good old “lines of code” days will make a comeback?

yea its wild

As someone who has worked for the government, I think you at least mistaken or very naive if you think that.

How so?

> I don't see the point

> Therefore I'm against this

Dude.

For non Germans, can you explain what this would mean? I read a machine translation of the article, and basically it seemed to be claiming that forming a tax exempt open source foundation in Germany would be easier if this were approved? But I may be missing some nuance in both the translation and the German legal and tax system to fully understand it?

In the USA, open source foundations can be non-profits, usually they are formed for scientific, and sometimes maybe educational purposes. (The allowed exempt purposes of a 501(c)(3), the most common type used for open source foundations, are "charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals".) There are other requirements that must be met for exemption as well.

I am curious how German and US laws differ in this regard, if you happen to know more about it. Thanks!

Maybe you are right and an Verein would be a better venue for this. What are your concerns with Ehrenämtern?

Apparantly you can receive up to 840€ per year tax free for it?

> Many open source projects are done without any good for the public

Such as? By definition, open source projects are provided to the public, for free. That’s obviously a good for the public.

Note that in order for something to be a public service, it need not be useful for every member of the public. Most people have no interest in curling, but that doesn’t mean running a non-profit curling club that is open to everyone isn’t a public good.