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this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025
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Free and Open Source Software
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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.
I don't see the problem. This can be forked, enhanced, updated, and modified and that version released with an appropriate copyleft license.
Sure; some companies will do the same with utterly horrific copyright licenses. That's fine; as it's in the public domain. We just need some group to work to provide an appropriate copyleft licensed version.
Ideally we should be getting on this fast; but we all know FOSS work isn't going to be fast if it's done by volunteers. Some funds might need raising.
In essence; CC0 is an ultimate copyleft license; as it does not even preclude the use of copyrighting improvements on variant works.
I also think it's important to point out separately that this software can be modified down into an easy to use software package that allows one to input relevant taxable financial data into it; and then when it comes time to file your taxes; you print out a long report; take it to your tax professional, who is now easily able to read that report, and use the information to appropriately file taxes.
Heck; that report might even make it drop dead simple to fill out your own tax forms; should you decide that's what you'd like to do; and you could feed the software the relevant tax forms in and it would fill them out to the best of it's ability using the data provided to it.