The IRS Tax Filing Software TurboTax Is Trying to Kill Just Got Open Sourced

www.404media.co

Without paywall:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250604141117/https://www.404media.co/directfile-open-source-irs-tax-filing-software-turbotax-is-trying-to-kil/

13 comments

It already has 4 PRs!
“All code paid for by taxpayer dollars should be open source, available for comment, for feedback, for people to build on and for people in other agencies to replicate. It saves everyone money and it is our [taxpayers’] IP,” she said.
- Nice! We need a Canadian fork
Wow, finally, a feel-good tech story.
Oh nice!
Ugh, it's licensed CC0 public domain. Assholes.
https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file/blob/main/LICENSE
- They're not assholes. If this is the work of the federal gouvernment then they're just following the law.
  A work of the United States government is defined by the United States copyright law, as "a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person's official duties".[1] Under section 105 of the Copyright Act of 1976,[2] such works are not entitled to domestic copyright protection under U.S. law and are therefore in the public domain.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_works_by_the_federal_government_of_the_United_States
  
  Did they even try to get the law changed?
  That law has exemptions (eg for the USPS). If they put zero effort into asking legislators to permit the IRS to ensure that the tax payers money doesn't just turn into a subsidy for corporations, they're assholes.
- How does this make them assholes?
  
  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.

13 comments