Buy European

Hi Thanks for the thorough answer.

the rough imprint regulations are known. But by choosing a firm over a non-profit or a natural person (e.g. with Impressums-Service) will always raise the questions like: what you are planning for. A company is by definition profit-oriented. Also the personal risk with this project is not a good argument, any legal debate with a company would have you to change or delete an entry, before actual money is involved. On the other hand, if a company really wants to pull through and sues you, you are liable with company deposit (beschränkte Haftung). Anyhow, this isn't you being transparent, but ordinary legal stuff.

Data Ownership Public facts (e.g., product/company names) can’t be copyrighted. Contributors’ data remains public knowledge. We only claim copyright on our own original content and creative work. We also double-check all hints submitted and then create the complete data set.

I believe this isn't quite right, as you can protect databases with re-arranged data or at least the effort put into re-arranging the database (bei geringer Schöpfungshöhe): https://www.ra-plutte.de/rechtlicher-schutz-von-datenbanken-alles-wichtige-im-ueberblick/ I don't know (or actually care) if that is already enough to for example sell a database.

Why Not Open Source? We respect open-source ideals but saw other projects struggle with clutter/inefficiency. We opted for a focused, curated approach to keep the database simple and user-friendly which seems to work exactly as intended based on your and other users’ feedback.

Does that exclude going open-source in the future, e.g. when the curated database is mature enough? I mean, you could for example just release the data, without having people to edit it. But then again you invested so much time into vetting the user contributions, that this would be a hard choice to make.

Why Not Non-Profit? First of all, we started the project overnight and therefore opted for an existing structure. German non-profits require heavy paperwork and oversight - overkill for a small, revenue-free project that we already invest a lot of time in but want to limit the financial spending. Also: No donations = no risk of mismanagement, which unfortunately happens left and right in the non-profit world.

There are also good counterexamples. Also the project could be moved to a an already existing non-profit organization, so there would be no money involved in founding. (E.V.s haben wir in DE ja schließlich genug :-). The proper ones all work with transparency reports to justify the money flow. I imaging being a company makes donations more cumbersome with the balance sheets and tax office.

This is a passion project: To support a cause we care about. To learn and experiment with new technology. To offer a streamlined database that follows our vision. Hope this helps and can be used as a reference in the future as these valid questions came up before and we answered them via other channels in the past.

All the answers don't sound like a long-term solution to me. It's' more like a pet project which can be dropped at any moments notice. Or even worse, if you decide to turn your page into an affiliate marketing gig or an ad-hell to cover the server costs...

Although nobody asked here yet: We went with .net as whatever we thought was a catchy name was not available in the .eu domain space. We obviously would have chosen .eu if it was available but people registered all those domain names to then not use same as it often happens on the Internet.

Yea. Scalpers. I checked some domains (for a fediverse instance) by myself and found it quite agitating, what is already taken and should be sold for several 10K.