If you make a petition with the official website and it passes they have to deal with it, even if its a rejection.
The petition only makes legal sense if it were to ask to extend the set of charitable goals as specified in the Abgabenordnung, but the existing set already allows for FOSS projects as part of e.g. the "national education" category (public code is educative).
Volunteering is defined by its charitable purpose for a public good, not by the specific skill used.
Let me try an analogy:
A chef who cooks a free meal for a homeless shelter is volunteering. That same chef publishing a recipe online or making a cooking tutorial is sharing knowledge, not volunteering. The act of 'cooking' or 'publishing' is neutral. It becomes volunteering only when the primary, direct, and organised purpose is to serve a charitable cause without expectation of personal gain.
Disclaimer: I have been consistently doing a lot of open source in the last 10 years. I would consider none of that as volunteering.
So also things like helping kids with their homework or giving people courses in your hackerspace, repaircafes, reading with others can fall into that.
So while maybe not all software that is open source also is automatically useful for the commons as it is now the definition is way too narrow. If you write software that helps one of the existing recognized causes it is openns source. If you write an open source photoshop or spend days working on software that keeps the world running you don't. But we need the latter people and supporting the former people makes the world a better place.
I'm guessing it doesn't count if you are being helped to help kids or give courses, does it? So not only it depends on what it is, it also depends on how it is done.
Open source in itself is not charitable, and many people get paid to contribute to open source projects.
My point is that I agree that some open source projects can count as volunteering, just like some masonry work. But I wouldn't say that "open source" should count as volunteering, just like for masonry.
also the term "gemeinnützig" is about the end result, not how it is produced. FOSS is gemeinnützig, even if the producers are paid.
That's exactly what I question. Let's say I develop an open source firmware specific to hardware I produce. It's not compatible with anything else, it's my proprietary hardware. The hardware is a tamagotchi (you wouldn't consider a tamagotchi "gemeinnützig", would you?). I use tivoisation, such that nobody can flash a different firmware than the one I write. Still the source code of that firmware is open source.
Is that gemeinnützig?
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?
Just like "masonry" is not volunteering, even though a mason could volunteer by building an orphanage pro bono. But when they build their own house, it's not volunteering.
I don't even think that being paid for building an orphanage counts as volunteering... does it?
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.
You'd need to formally recognize open-source projects that the German state approves of, on a case-by-case basis.
And even then you have questions like "If Hans Reiser is sentenced to community service for killing his wife, can he satisfy that by working on reiserfs? How is that different from sentencing him to no punishment?"
I think this is the real killer feature here. Software companies could save money by simply open-sourcing parts of their software.
Similarly R&D tax incentives could be made to only apply if the R&D is publically available (for study, and any use)
a sport maybe a hobby. running a sportsclub is volunteer work. writing code for fun is a hobby, publishing and maintaining it for others should be volunteer work.
On an individual basis I don't think giving tax breaks to anyone with a chatGPT tab open makes sense.