- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
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Was the US so behind that they didn’t have a way to file taxes online for free?
Not behind, ahead. Just you wait.
Uh no … the US is behind on this and payment platforms and invoice creation and a ton of other shir
I’m not sure you got what I meant, which was that the US may end up dragging others in its wake. Time will tell. I just know it’s not just the US that has seen a rise in right wing politics.
And so, yeah, I said it kind of tongue in cheek, but I’m concerned it’s the start of a trend. But hey, maybe there’s an asteroid inbound.
Here the second right most party just let the coalition fall
Can you elaborate a bit, as far as where here is and what coalition? I have ideas but I don’t wanna make assumptions. And obviously that’s is you feel comfortable doing so, not trying to blow you up. But I’m interested in what’s happening elsewhere you know? And I am just not sure I trust the news.
In NL Geert Wilders let the coalition fall but it was one of the worst coalitions we have had
Unfortunately yes
Yes, thanks to the powerful lobby from Turbotax.
Oh that’s awesome. I hope it can still be accepted by the IRS for the future (if we still have one in ~3 years) but it would be neat to just be able to have an open standard for online filing.
Don’t worry, there will always be an IRS for us plebes.
It’s licensed under CC0 to anyone wondering. BSD 0-Clause would probably be better but still fantastic.
CC0 is a horrible thing to use for software. It seems great, but it specifically does not give patent rights. Compare that to MIT which implicitly does so. CC0 specifically says it does not.
The US government doesn’t (to my knowledge at least) have copyright protections so MIT wouldn’t be possible. BSD 0-Clause is just better because e.g. Austria doesn’t allow you to cede copyright to the public domain and CC0 directly mentions the public domain in the terms of the license.
Interesting, SPDX does not list 0BSD as FSF approved, but FSF does approve it. This isn’t the first problem I’ve seen with SPDX’s list. They say CC0 is FSF approved but FSF only says it is approved for things besides code.
Could you explain why this is bad? Software patents aren’t a great thing, are they?
Correct. They’re bad. And if someone releases code under CC0 that has patented stuff in it you may be liable for using their patent without permission because CC0 says in section 4a,
No trademark or patent rights held by Affirmer are waived, abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this document.
Compare that to MIT which is considered to implicitly grant patent rights by saying you may deal in the software without restriction. Apache specifically gives you explicit patent rights in section 3.
Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work, where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their Contribution(s) alone or by combination of their Contribution(s) with the Work to which such Contribution(s) was submitted. If You institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.
So the problem is that CC0 in it’s public license fallback specifically says that it does not grant patent rights.
CC0 is a trap for software. Please avoid it. Please encourage others so avoid it.
To the extent of my knowledge, the only public domain dedication with permissive license fallback that is approved by both FSF and OSI is the WTFPL. Which is also a crayon license. Public domain is a weird concept and not all jurisdictions have it and not all jurisdictions allow you to manually put things into it. This is why they need the permissive license fallback. You’re better off using a well known and well understood permissive license.
Thank you for the through explanation! That was very helpful
Correct. You release something under CC0, someone else sees it, patents it, and sues you.
What happened to the title of this?? Jeez
“The IRS Tax Filing Software that TurboTax Is Trying to Kill Just Got Open Sourced” might be more clear but headlines try to cut those sorts of words out, unfortunately at the cost of readability sometimes.
They accidentally included 8 verbs. (tax, filing, is, trying, kill, got, open, sourced)
But most of those aren’t used as verbs here.
right, but you can only tell what’s used as a verb after you’ve parsed it.
I got told I couldn’t get a tax return because they flagged me for potential fraud, so I have to go to ID.me to verify… but then my account got banned while trying to verify my information.
Fml
I love id.me, I’m so glad I had to give my facial data to them to collect unemployment insurance!
Guess that means they don’t want your money! Woo! (this is not legal advice, pay your taxes)
Hurry up and clone that ASAP, this is gonna get taken down once DOGE realizes what it is
More likely they’ll just turn off or unpublish the API that it depends on.
Is that even available right now? Usually for this type of thing you need API keys, which are not included, nor available at all.
Direct File interprets the United States’ Internal Revenue Code (26 USC) as plain language questions, the answers to which should be known to taxpayers without need of external instructions or publications. Taxpayers’ answers are then translated into standard tax forms and transmitted to the IRS’s Modernized e-File (MeF) API, which is available for authorized public use
So before the API it still generates everything you need to mail in the forms?
Probably. It would need to be updated with new laws and rules though.
Recreating the API seems doable? If we can recreate dead MMO servers…
Are you comparing online game servers to the American tax system? Because I really want a ban.
Well, you probably could. Issue is that you can’t self host the IRS. If they aren’t running the service that accepts the data there isn’t much you can do.
Direct File interprets the United States’ Internal Revenue Code (26 USC) as plain language questions, the answers to which should be known to taxpayers without need of external instructions or publications. Taxpayers’ answers are then translated into standard tax forms and transmitted to the IRS’s Modernized e-File (MeF) API, which is available for authorized public use
because this is the first pull request and something many people will see, I would like to say that I learned from a former project manager at the IRS that development on Direct File has stopped since January. the source code is only public because of federal law. it’s not likely that this is going to be merged but it’s possible that the components of Direct File might be used elsewhere
Don’t get your hopes up too much.
I wonder if this could be altered to work for other countries
I can see the EU funding it. This could be a measure to allow Blue States circumvent the federal system - a CaliTAX, AlohaTAX, ect. This would be vital during a civil war scenario, so that the Blue States can having working taxation systems without having to redo everything.
TurboTax owned buy intuit, part of H&R block who has partnered with credit karma. Everything is a monopoly now
Yeah I saw Monopoly Fortnite I wonder what is next?
I know, what are they making next? Lord of the Rings edition? Star Wars? Oh the humanities.
It’s already got 4 PRs
lol
7 open now, 2 closed
XD
One of the currently open ones is this one:
https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file/pull/11
Hilarious
Low effort pull, deletes the problem instead of putting the work in to correct it. /jk
IDK LGTM
Unless it’s maintained it won’t be of much use. It needs to be kept up to date with tax laws, and it relies entirely on the IRS accepting the generated returns. It seems it may function for now, though.
Direct File interprets the United States’ Internal Revenue Code (26 USC) as plain language questions, the answers to which should be known to taxpayers without need of external instructions or publications. Taxpayers’ answers are then translated into standard tax forms and transmitted to the IRS’s Modernized e-File (MeF) API, which is available for authorized public use
Linux geeks, assemble!
Web devs too!
Direct File is maintained by the IRS themselves though.
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-house-republican-kill-irs-direct-file-2025-5
Will it continue to be?
The code to generate the forms should be simple enough… But the amounts, the deductions, the laws, the rules…etc, these all need to be checked by an accountant or lawyer… It might be a good method to double check a return, but if the return isn’t guaranteed to be correct by the IRS or an accountant is checking details…I would be worried
Right. Well it should be good for 2025, so it depends on how much/if any changes there are in the next year.
Suck a bag of dicks, TurboTax
The more money you pay someone to find the loop holes in the tax code the less likely you are to support out government and its war machine.
HA get fucked turbotax
THIS is the way.
Archive of the full article: https://archive.ph/6qJ6v
