> The move may still not happen if the foundation can’t find a suitable country to relocate to. Ireland is out, because of a requirement for directors to be residents; France too, because of the difficulty in guaranteeing English-language services.
So moving to the EU solves some problems but adds more?
The idea that the Foundation wouldn’t be able to find English language services in France is a bit of a stretch. I’ve been working in tech here in France for a while now and whether in startups, tech companies, or independently, I’ve never had any trouble conducting business almost entirely in English if I (as the customer) preferred to.
I had a small tech business in Southern France and without the help of a native french speaker it would have been impossible to navigate the Kafkaesque french bureaucracy.
One really needs an imperative reason to move a business from the UK to France considering how much more business-friendly and, well, sensible, the UK is.
It does not die because there's still truth in it. Bureaucracy is still Kafkaesque for a start. I have been dealing with both British and French administrations extensively and I can tell you it's night and day.
I can't speak for Britain but a lot of administrative services in France are digital now. I'm rarely trapped in bureaucratic nonsense like I would have been say ten years ago. Most services you'd require on any given day (taxes, welfare, unemployment office, healthcare, ID registration, voting registration, starting a basic corporate structure) are trivially available.
The biggest problem now is discoverability as government programs are still habitually arcane and UI/UX grammar. Some countries, I'm thinking especially of Germany, have national standards that make services appear uniform whereas in France every administration is still its own little shop.
As someone who's trying to renew his passport: Services have partially moved online (still have to attend in person...) but they still are bureaucratic nonsense, indeed.
Bureaucracy is Kafkaesque because of the complicated and seemingly random rules, because of the abundance of taxes, etc. There really needs to be a drastic reset of everything.
A good example: The attestation people had to print and fill in if they wanted to leave home during the lockdown. Why? This is bonkers even if it eventually became digital.
Another good example: Starting a business. I don't know if it can be simpler and faster than the way it works in the UK. In France, on the other hand...
As a Francophile Brit that grew up in France, and with the greatest of respect, you are French. It's a totally different story if you are not French. The bureucracy is horrific, even today. My parents have lived there for 30 years, both are fully integrated into the community, and they still face bureuctratic issues and delays, even digitally because they are not French. I'm not suggesting in any way that France is a particulaly xenophobic nation - us Brits have that sewn up, sadly - but the system is very xenophobic in my long experience.
English is an official language in the EU only in Ireland and Malta though, so if Ireland is out and English is a requirement, it shouldn't be difficult to decide which country to move to.
The EU is in an unfortunate situation due to 1.3 billion people speaking English, but also due to member states being too slow in making their governments fully digital. Speaking from experience, it is easier to set up and run a British limited company remotely from Prague than doing so with a Czech company from its own capital.
As someone who has done business on Malta I would not recommend it. Even opening a bank account is a pain on that island. I wouls not want to operate a nob-profit there.
>France too, because of the difficulty in guaranteeing English-language services.
As someone who's done English support in France, it sounds like preconceived notions that don't match reality. The tech industry is usually literate in English, even if the rest of the country can't give a care.
As a French-speaking brit who's been on a tech course in France, tech discourse in French is pretty challenging. Sure, most individual French techs speak very good English. But "ordinateurs", reseaux", "bases de donnees" - I should have got myself a decent tech French/English dictionary. Schoolboy French doesn't cut it in tech.
I don't think that they're particularly concerned with finding tech talent who are able to converse in English. This (potential) move is about enjoying continued legal protections - and if they did have to engage with the legal system in order to defend these then they certainly would not be able to use English officially in the French legal system.
I think in Germany it's more common to incorporate as a registered association (eingetragener Verein, e.V.) for most non-profit activities. For example, the legal entity for the KDE project is KDE e.V.
Admittedly, IANAL, and I don't know much about how foundations (Stiftungen) work in German law, but from experience, e.V. has the advantages of being relatively easy to set up and maintain, being super common so lots of people have experience with it, and having the option of becoming tax-exempt if you put the right weasel words into the statute and file some paperwork with the tax office.
IANAL as well and what I've heard fits well with what you wrote. I have one anecdote that kind of suits the topic: Florian Effenberger, one of the founders of The Document Foundation" also does Open Source Cooking as a side project. It was set up as an e. V. but not tax exempt. A couple of years ago I've heard Florian say in person that he avoided making it tax exempt because it would be such a hassle. Of course Open Source Cooking is only a small endeavor and that might have played a role in his decision.
I'm not really sure what the overall conclusion is except that choosing a suitable legal structure is not easy.
The core of the problem is the part that I sort of glossed over when I said:
> tax-exempt if you put the right weasel words into the statute
The law lists a finite amount of ways [1] in which an e.V. can act in the public interest ("Gemeinnützigkeit") and thus become tax-exempt. Most of these items are engineered to cover existing e.V. For instance, sports clubs are explicitly covered, as are consumer protection watchdogs.
For any associations doing charitable work in the IT context, the issue is that none of these bullet points in the legal text explicitly cover such activities. There has been some support for the idea of adding free software as a charitable cause to this list, but nothing has come out of it as of yet.
I'm familiar with this topic because I'm volunteering in the Chaos Computer Club. Most local chapters are constituted as e.V. and are tax-exempt under the purpose of public education ("Förderung der Volksbildung") since that one is the easiest to get away with if you do any sort of public events that can be considered education every once in a while (like conferences or talks or such).
So moving to the EU solves some problems but adds more?