It must be seated where the business happens for compliance with tax laws. But you may have a French S.a.r.l. in Germany and thus fall under their company law (with impact on publication responsibilities, company governance etc.)

While for some cases there is room for abuse (like Amazon Kindle eBooks are sold to Germany by a company situated in Luxembourg, while only selling via amazon.de to audience with German residency) However my employer is a Dutch B.V. with headquarters in Germany, thus they avoid having to form a board with works council representatives as a German GmbH (or AG) of comparable size would require.

> It's none of their business what you want to do with your company

There are plenty of European member states that want the ability to control very precisely what you do with "your company". You want to call yourself "a software engineer"? Ooops...

In the EU it seems particularly the German-speaking countries are borderline obsessed with a) titles, and b) whom may use those titles. See, for instance, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34096464

Several sectors of economic activities have the potential for atrocious externalities and it's absolutely the government's business to know about these and make sure that you're following regulation to minimize these externalities. When you make your employees the neighbours sick (or straight up kill them) it's an enormous failure on the part of government. It's easy to be oblivious to that when you only think about software.

Exhibit A: https://www.ctvnews.ca/montreal/article/battery-facility-acc...

Actually I think I might be mistaken that you are even required to make a business plan. It's listed as one of the steps on the states portal about founding. But it goes on to say that it's not technically required, just highlights its importance.

https://www.existenzgruendungsportal.de/Navigation/DE/So-geh...

It's basically a proof of "most basic effort" that you're serious. You could probably note down some stuff on a single A4 and get it approved, it doesn't have to be a 40 page dossier.

Kind of like fizzbuzz, just something really simple and most basic to get rid of the "easy scams" and so on.

Edit: So "easy scams" are probably the wrong word, I initially wrote "riffraff" because in my mothertoungue that isn't so... disparaging, but what I meant was that it's used as "bare minimum filter" basically.

There’s absolutely no need to have a business plan to start a company in Germany. You articles of incorporation and they state a company purpose, but this can be something as simple as “do IT consulting”.

Obviously, having a credible plan helps if you try to convince banks to loan you money or any such thing, but the act of registering a company requires no such thing.

There is no problem, because no business plan is required.

> This isn't an EU move, is it?

What, exactly, do you mean with "EU move"?

I guess technically it's a "European Commission" move, but overall it's a European and EU move, unless "move" has some specific meaning to you.