Mastodon becoming a US entity with a neoliberal board of directors and the goal of growth über alles is the issue here folks, not whether Eugen and company are compensated for their work. Of course they should be and well too. Or is that a privilege reserved only for the mediocre yes-people at the Googles and the Facebooks of the world?
Here’s a longer thread I wrote elsewhere. (1/7)
@aral Very specifically, this is a German, not an EU, fuck-up. The German tax codes defines a very narrow, and very 1950ies view of what’s a charitable cause and the Federal ministry of finances has not been moving on this point at all. Notably, other charities with political intent had their previously granted status removed (check Campact for instance).
There’s another big issue with this in general, and that’s an EU issue: There is no way to set up an EU-wide charitable cause entity. So you’d have to run 27 entities to get tax deductability (is this a word?) in the entire EU.
While it’s sad to read this, it’s absolutely understandable that they took this step. The implications … yeah, yet another Mozilla or Wikipedia foundation with questionable priorities decoupled from the actual project.
But please bash the German government and only then the EU ;-)
@aral In particular, imho Mastodon gGmbH should - together with other FOSS vendors and civil society entities - lobby to change §52 AO [1, 2] to include developing FOSS.
It already lists for example:
- art and culture
- life saving
- internationalism, of tolerance in all areas of culture and of the concept of international understanding
- consumer counselling and consumer protection
and, my favourite: - “sport (chess shall be considered to be a sport)” (this is not a joke: “Schach gilt als Sport”)
They are all each by themselves pretty arbitrary, and one can easily see how Mastodon touches a lot of them but doesn’t really match.
That’s also probably why it was first granted (one interpretation by the office) and then rejected (another, narrower interpretation).
[1] §52 AO english inofficial translation: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_ao/englisch_ao.html#p0441
[2] §52 Abgabenordnung, official, German: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/ao_1977/__52.html
@aral Ffs, “traditional customs including regional carnival” explicitly counts as charitable cause.