71–80 of 265 posts
It takes me like 5 minutes to file tax every year.
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Be serious.
I am serious. And Red Hat had $3.4 billion in revenue the year it was acquired. There are plenty of people getting paid to write open source software. The top contributors to open source projects are frequently for-profit companies. Open source != hobbyist. There’s nothing about paid software development that requires source code to be kept private.
I worked on tax software and have seen these kind of efforts. Noble, yes. Short lived, yes. It’s relatively easy to make a free 1040 file. The real problem comes from all. The. Edge. Cases. 1) do you support xyz state? 2) what if I lived in multiple states? 3) what if i… And on and on. And it’s not just one and done. Every year IRS and states are changing their shit so you have to go thru and make all kind of updates…
Some other countries just tell you where you stand because for the vast majority of people a standard filing is all that's required. In those circumstances, only the edge cases need to deal with complexities. In the US, everyone does.
But I am of course pessimistic on tax reform since that general populace just accepts "oh yeah filing taxes sucks" at the same time that tax service providers lobby congress who, absent a strong outcry from their voters, just follow the corporate money trail.
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I am serious. And Red Hat had $3.4 billion in revenue the year it was acquired. There are plenty of people getting paid to write open source software. The top contributors to open source projects are frequently for-profit companies. Open source != hobbyist. There’s nothing about paid software development that requires source code to be kept private.
Their customers aren’t paying for the software.
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I don't think any other country does taxes as awfully as the US. Where I live, there's a government provided portal that has most of the stuff already filled from my employer. It gets "complicated" if I earn income from the side such as investments, contract work etc and even that is just a matter of filling forms on their website in a similar manner to how the author suggests filling fields in an Excel sheet and oth…
Sure, but the US also generates about 40% of it's income from personal income taxes, compared to ~25% average across OECD https://files.taxfoundation.org/20210217111150/Sources-of-ta... from https://taxfoundation.org/us-tax-revenue-2021/ My guess reading this (and my experience growing up in India) is that many countries simply ignore income taxes (if you're the average schmoe with a regular job and salary, you pay t…
There is then a process where people with more complex tax affairs then fill in a government questionnaire on a website which instantly calculates the tax rebate/payment required and adjusts your tax balance.
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No it can’t.
I bought my first Linux distro in a box on a shelf in a store.
The guy in my apt. building who loaned me the floppies got a full-time linux job the next day. :)
The huge advantage of Linux over SCO (which was unbundled) were the free networking, X11, compilers ... and multiple virtual terminals.
So I was one of the first serious Reiserfs users - even SUSE reps don't believe me when I say I was using it in production (for mail server workloads) around 2001. :)
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Their customers aren’t paying for the software.
They do make a lot of money from value add services, but in some cases, yes they absolutely are paying for software. This is fairly common when people want features/updates that don’t yet exist.
I worked on tax software and have seen these kind of efforts. Noble, yes. Short lived, yes. It’s relatively easy to make a free 1040 file. The real problem comes from all. The. Edge. Cases. 1) do you support xyz state? 2) what if I lived in multiple states? 3) what if i… And on and on. And it’s not just one and done. Every year IRS and states are changing their shit so you have to go thru and make all kind of updates…
>> Generally not the kind of thing for open source Hard to know in advance, if OS communities can do something well or not. There are examples of taking on pretty sprawling problems successfully. On multi Language, portability and such they can often beat the "armies."
It's easy to have open source project where the stakes are "bad translation" or something that doesn't result in fines or problems with IRS/law.