the readme has a german section right above the english one.

Ah, right you are! Didn't notice it thanks to the anchor link.

Doesn't change the commit history's melange of English and German.

All Germans I have ever met have had excellent English. Certainly good enough to read short English commits with only the occasional dictionary reference required.

The Eurobarometer report from 2006 says 56% of Germans speak English.

But I suspect that rather underestimates the case here. There is a huge difference between someone checking a box on a form that says they can speak English and being able to parse short messages in English.

And given only fairly educated, tech-savvy Germans are likely to participate in this, I think the negative effect from English commits is straight up zero, or at worst incredibly low.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-sp...

It's been a few years since I visited Germany, but it varied quite a bit with region, level of education, and age (pretty universal among younger Gymnasiasten, very rare among older people in former East Germany, particularly more rural parts).

I have gotten reactions from "Why did you bother to learn German? Everyone here speaks English" to "Gott sei dank! Du kannst Deutsch" ("Thank god! You can speak German")

I second that.

I'd like my government to do the same! Don't really care about the versioning system, as long as it's open-source and alive.

Actually, it is not "the government" doing this. It is somebody scraping an official web site containing every law, processing it and pushing the result to this repository.