In any other company, employee salaries are counted as an operating expense against revenue, much like raw materials, utility bills, etc.
If you sell $100 of goods and you have $100 of expenses, you have $0 net income and owe no taxes as a company- you've made no money!
Because software salaries are counted as research and development, and 174 forces you to amortize the expense over five years, you are now in a much harder position:
You sell $100 worth of software and have $100 of developer salaries. You haven't made any money, and you have $0 in your bank account. The government compels you to not expense more than $20 of those salaries, and taxes the remaining $80 of revenue. You are now bankrupt.
I signed the petition but I wanted to offer an some background for an alternate POV (that I think I mostly disagree with).
You have $600k in the bank. You hire 4 people to build a house. The materials for the house cost $200k and the 4 people cost $400k. Total expenses $600k and you now have $0 in your bank. You can deduct $600k in expenses, but!, you now have a house worth $$$$. You have to pay taxes on this house as it's an asset and worth $$$$. Your total worth is not $0 (your bank account). It's $0 + the house.
Change house to software. You created something new. The government is claiming that something, software or house, is worth $$$$
I see the point. I have no idea how to value software. I guess the gov might say, to find the value, delete the software, how much would it cost for you to replace it (as one idea)
Similarly with other expenses. You have $200k. You hire office workers at $95k each to do some work and buy two $5k PCs for them to use. At the end of the year you have $0 in the bank. The law sees it as you have $0 in the bank + two $5k computers. You owe taxes on that $10k (the 2 computers). For these, you're allowed to deprecate them 5 years. So you own taxes on $8k.
Note: this issue of equipment being deprecated has killed lots of small businesses, mostly because they are new and unaware (been there (T_T)). If you buy $100k of equipment (furniture deprecates over 7 years), you budgeted $1m for the year with $0 left over (making a product that takes 2-3 years to finish) but you've got to pay taxes on ~80% of the $100k of equipment even though you thought you'd made no money.
Many business opt to lease computers (and furniture?). This way they don't own it so it's not an asset and they can expense 100%. Unfortunately if you're a new startup no one will lease to you as you have no credit history (been there (T_T))
Under the new rules, on the ~3yr software project (like a game) with $1m per year budget, after the first year you'd owe taxes on $1m because you could not deduct any salary expenses. All of your employees are doing software dev by the definitions of the new tax law.
I don't think it is reasonable to use employee salaries as the measure of market value. Companies buy and sell other companies based on performance, not cost to build.
Employees are an operating expense.