“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.
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.
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.
Eh, I wouldn't call them assholes for that. I'm sure there's a minefield of legal issues that could come up that is mitigated by releasing it to public domain. By the same logic, anyone can also take the code, modify it, then release their modifications with a copy left license.
Because it’s a gift to corporations at the expense of taxpayers.
Seeing as how the free filing system was shot in the head several times for no other reason but that it directly benefits tax payers, that's not much of gift in comparison to the fact that tax payers will have to keep paying money anyway. If it's any consolation, we might get a FOSS tax filer, which is still better then the current form we got.
If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.
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