Based IRS. So the torch will need to be carried by open source devs.
Article says it was always required to be open source and it is not an act of defiance
Cooperating with the law is often percieved as an act of defiance with this administration, though.
I suspect that they’ve been pressured to keep it out of public by turbo tax lobbyists, but with the straight on attempt to kill it lately, they decided just to ignore that pressure and push it out to spite those lobbyists.
Isn’t most software made by the US government required to be open source anyway?
Actually, it’s illegal for them to make software copyleft :(
We need to change that law :(
That’s just untrue. The NSA even has a pretty cool repo.
Unfortunately it’s not untrue. There are some exceptions to the law.
Either NSA got an exception or their code is public domain
Ahahahahaha this is America we’re talking about
Licensed CC0. Assholes.
Why assholes?
For profit companies can take it, close source it, and make it paid software. Which is why GPL is superior.
But people can keep developing an open-source version, right?
Yeah but people can be stupid bastards. For some reason some people would rather get it from TurboTax than they would a github repo
Yeah. I see. Thanks for the replies.
Because it’s a gift to corporations at the expense of taxpayers.
It means that any company can take that code, modify it (as would be required every year per IRS tax changes), and resell it without being required to publish the source code changes.
What many European countries are doing is requiring the government to publish code under a copyleft license. That would allow companies to also benefit from this code to make their own tools (which they could also sell), and it would require them to publish the source code of their improvements.
Basically copyleft legally ensures collaboration. Public domain does not.
