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Petition to formally recognize open source work as civic service in Germany
(www.openpetition.de)
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this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2025
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I assume only German citizens can sign this? I upvoted here if that helps, because it sounds like a great initiative, maybe if this gains traction this can go europe wide?
The difficult part is measuring work done I'm afraid though. For volunteer work as e.g. reading books to kids or cleaning streets it's relatively easy to see that things are happening, even if some are better/faster than others. Unless you're going to force people to work in live calls or whatever, or just trust self-reporting, that's going to be hard, no?
Or do you mean more like subsidies for nonprofits working in open source?
Either way, good initiative, I hope for its success!
In Germany there is a legally recognised form of volunteering called Ehrenamt (honorary office), mostly used by non-profit organisations. It has benefits for taxes, gaining public funding, and such. E.g. if you are the primary caretaker of an elderly family member you can get unemployment benefits without having to look for work, since it is recognised as a public good.
The petition aims to recognise work on Open Source software as such an honorary office.
A Git history would be quite an easy way to show that you are doing something regularly.
Sadly these days people can just tell some LLM to make changes and waste everyone's time, on top of being fraud in this case
Which would lead to them being excluded from the project in a short time, I'd wager.
I'm a bit sceptical, especially of governments lagging behind these things. I'm hopeful that this will solve itself or be solved soon though.
I don't think the government has much to do here. It's not like if other organizations would have an influence from the government's side.
Open source orgs are usually NGO, and the big ones will spit garbage pretty quickly.
There's a million easier ways to claim the German unemployment money than that
a git history is easily fabricated. you can freely edit it, remove entries or write into it whatever you want, including impersonating other users and fabricating datetime
https://github.com/Amog-OS/AmogOS/commit/4f503a0
While true, a git history is also easily protected against fabrication. Require cryptographically signed commits and prevent contributors from force-pushing to the public repo and you should be good.
I mean, if you try to "scam" the gov, you can clone some codeberg repo to github, rename it, rewrite history to make the commits look like you did everything and then tell the gov "look at how much work I volunteered". At least in germany, there are currently not enough public workers so many little things go unchecked.
Ah I see, yeah I guess something like that would be possible. On the other hand it would be trivial to prove this happened even in the future as long as the government keeps a unedited copy of this repo.