Can you link a court case to support this argument? I was once in an association (ry) and we tried finding out if we could have a donation link on our website and we were told it is not allowed. Even just having a bank account number was not allowed. The only way to receive a donation would have been for a person to ask us proactively and then we could tell _that person only_ our bank account number.
I run a free web service where some users have asked me to set up a donation system but AFAIK it is illegal so I haven't done it. Instead I set up a company and will sell premium accounts with some borderline useless but actual feature that normal accounts don't have, so that it's no longer a donation.
"Donate to me" sounds like a pretty explicit appeal to give money, so I would personally steer away from that to not get in trouble with the law ("rahankeräyksellä [tarkoitetaan] toimintaa, jossa yleisöön vetoamalla kerätään vastikkeetta rahaa" & "yleisöön vetoamisella [tarkoitetaan] suullisesti, kirjallisesti tai muulla tavoin ilmaistua pyyntöä tai kehotusta antaa rahaa keräykseen").
AFAIK, just adding your PayPal details or bank account number to your website would be okay because you would not be making any sort of an appeal.
Very interesting read as an Estonian.
Apart from being legal, we even have a special field on our income declaration form (which we fill every year) that is specifically for money earned through ways like that. If I recalled correctly it's under "Income received abroad
-> Salary and other remuneration".
I also run a donation based site (which also has ads) and I declare both of these on the form and pay my share of taxes from it. But it is then fully legal money and I can do whatever I like with it from government perspective.
I don't speak any Finnish at all, but if the wording is so important, wouldn't it work if you ask the money to pay for the services cost instead? Not as a donation to yourself. Servers cost, your time costs etc. Could all be counted as an upkeep of the project.
You have to remember that we're talking about a country whose police considered Wikipedia to be fundraising money illegally with their global donations based system, due to Finnish laws: https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-7144745
I don't think it's a worthwhile risk to take for Finnish open source developers to accept donations and think it won't be considered illegal by the authorities.
It was only district court but the prosecutor did not seek the court of appeals (which they legally have to do if there's a chance their view might succeed), leaving the precedent.
Note that Effi no longer lists the mentioned donation details on their website[1] and their verbiage is much more limited now so I don't know how much they themselves count on the court case. I would like to see the actual court case transcripts but they were not linked in the articles, shame.
So you might legally be somewhat limited in what you can write there (like "donate to me SO THAT I can write more code YOU enjoy"), but saying
"Support me / donate to me / Support my work through Ko-Fi"
is entirely fine.