So moving to the EU solves some problems but adds more?
Expect bank accounts in other countries (like Revolut, Transferwise etc) to be closed suddenly because "Malta".
I think that's key.
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.
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.
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...
Simply not true.
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.
Very noticeable change vs the first time I visited in the early 90's.
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.
I'm not really sure what the overall conclusion is except that choosing a suitable legal structure is not easy.
> 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).