The IRS open sourced much of its incredibly popular Direct File software as the future of the free tax filing program is at risk of being killed by Intuit’s lobbyists and Donald Trump’s megabill. Meanwhile, several top developers who worked on the software have left the government and joined a project to explore the “future of tax filing” in the private sector.
Direct File is a piece of software created by developers at the US Digital Service and 18F, the former of which became DOGE and is now unrecognizable, and the latter of which was killed by DOGE. Direct File has been called a “free, easy, and trustworthy” piece of software that made tax filing “more efficient.” About 300,000 people used it last year as part of a limited pilot program, and those who did gave it incredibly positive reviews, according to reporting by Federal News Network.
But because it is free and because it is an example of government working, Direct File and the IRS’s Free File program more broadly have been the subject of years of lobbying efforts by financial technology giants like Intuit, which makes TurboTax. DOGE sought to kill Direct File, and currently, there is language in Trump’s massive budget reconciliation bill that would kill Direct File. Experts say that “ending [the] Direct File program is a gift to the tax-prep industry that will cost taxpayers time and money.”
is there a way to de-paywall 404media.co?
No paywall for this article yet: “Sign up for free access to this post”, it’s not a free trial.
Still a wall between people clicking the link and the content.
The way I usually do it is by flagging the article and asking the mods to please ban articles from this site.
Post is low effort if OP didn’t bother trying to find a source that’s accessible to all. It only takes a few minutes ffs
Or OP just likes the independent outlet 404 Media, as I also do. Gizmodo features AI-generated articles (ones with the byline “Gizmodo bot”). It takes a simple adblocker or the bypass paywalls clean extension to bypass the authwall.
It doesn’t matter what OP likes. We shouldn’t be linking to inaccessible content on Lemmy. That’s low effort posting that harms our communities.
What’s the license?
Edit: Ugh, it’s licensed CC0 public domain. Assholes.
Seems correct to me. It was paid for by the US public, using US public funds, it belongs in the public domain.
I also wish they had GPL’d it, but I’m not sure this would be appropriate here.
Not familiar how is that bad?
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.
