-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Thursday, 2009-07-16 at 13:21 -0700, Randall R Schulz wrote:
On Thursday July 16 2009, Fred A. Miller wrote:
...
If it's open source, then someone should be able to make the changes needed for the US!
This has come up before. Tax preparation software, if it's to be more useful than just a generic spreadsheet, must embody the tax code, and that makes it very labor intensive to maintain and that labor takes the form of people who have considerable expertise in the tax laws reading and understanding the tax code and tracking the annual changes that congress makes to those laws.
It's just not the sort of thing that's practical for open-source software. Nor would I want to trust an amateur's encoding of the tax laws to guide the creation of my tax return.
In Spain the government makes the tax software, or pays someone to do it, I'm not sure - meaning, it is made for windows only, with some exceptions. There is a linux/mac version, using the citrix engine and a dedicated server from the government. Other forms are special PDF files that need the adobe reader; I believe they also have, but not to the public, special adobe servers that allow them to fill those PDF forms with calculations, using the adobe reader on client machines in their intranet. All this means that here it will be difficult for the public to trust third party tax software, and even worse if they think it is made by amateurs. Actually, I think there are some linux solutions here, but I've never used them. I think it is hardly viable to have a unified tax software for linux, world wide... it depends a lot on the laws of each country, with the result that the existing software solutions are also very different. - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkpfp08ACgkQtTMYHG2NR9XxhACgk0B3gX6XmDSu4VhUN6kweiYI NloAn2V0aNNvdm3TqVSpl0mBOs0MKSa9 =3oZA -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org