really good article with a couple surprises in there.
"some people speculated that, because of the political pressure against it, its release must have been an act of resistance by someone within the IRS. But the open sourcing of the program was always part of the plan, and was required by a law called the SHARE IT Act. It happened “fully above board, which is honestly more of a feat!,” Given told 404 Media. “This has been in the works since last year.”
Vinton told 404 Media in a phone call that the open sourcing of Direct File “is just good government.”
“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. “This is just good government and should absolutely be the standard that government technologists are held to.”"
Dunno, sounds like some fucking commie shit to be. And not the kind i can someyimes get on board with when it comes time to do secret police shebanigans, but the bad scary kind where they dont even have a use for police.
Wouldn’t it be better to just give the code for free to a good corporate citizen who can be entrusted with its stewardship?
Edit: yes of course we rent it back!
only if the corporate citizen promises really hard we can trust them. like a super promise.
Also we have to pay them whenever we want to use the code. Yes.
you bought it, why shouldn’t you also rent it?
“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. “This is just good government and should absolutely be the standard that government technologists are held to.”"
Nice sentiment, but bad take. Open-sourcing the software that runs our military equipment would be a fantastic gift to the bad actors of the world.
Our entire Internet, the backbone of all encryption, all runs on open source software.
It is more secure because people can see and audit the code.
Let me flip what you wrote:
Our military equipment already is vulnerable. We just don’t know how badly because it’s not open source.
Prove it’s secure by releasing the code.
security through obscurity is not security
Security can mean security against hackers, but it can also mean security against revealing classified information. Classified information about weapons systems (e.g. performance characteristics) is inherently embedded into the code running on those systems, and therefore shouldn’t be open sourced.
Source: used to write classified code
then the code maintainers are doing it wrong.
Any information that shouldn’t be public knowledge such as specs, account credentials, access tokens etc should be in a configurable/dynamic format such as an ENV variable or a config file, that way confidential info isn’t part of the working tree.
This should not be an issue in a properly maintained codebase.
Was the US so behind that they didn’t have a way to file taxes online for free?
Not just that. The tax preparation industry has gotten tax more complex and harder to file in the US
You get the government you can afford. The tax preparation industry has been able to buy several governments
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
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.
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.
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
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.
It’s already got 4 PRs
lol
