Slashdot Mirror
Taxing Free Software
Jarek Sygitowicz writes "Lets look backward: nearly a month ago. One officer taxed 6 GNU/Linux
boxes and two Star Offices at the price of 6 Microsoft Windows and 2
Microsoft Offices. The affair was widely commented and stirred a wave
of protests. We heard from various sources that the Government, trying
to patch a big hole, is preparing for the impossible: a tax on using
Free Software." Sounds crazy? For now this is true only in Poland (which, btw, has the coolest tld, even if they have a messed up tax system ;)
Well, I don't know anything about Polish Law. But I can see how this might happen: where there are VAT or other taxes on property/transfers, then some sort of fair market value must be used for the taxation. A common method of tax evasion is undervaluing the property.
The Polish tax official obviously thought that Linux and StarOffice were at least as good as MS-Windows and Office. As you going to dispute his good judgement? So they were worth as much, and should be taxed as much.
This is not an easy dilemma for free software to solve. The concept of something good for nothing sounds impossible to many people. Tax officials read that impossibility as tax evasion.
My point exactly -- unless they are charging an excise tax.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
--Fesh
"Citizens have rights. Consumers only have wallets." - gilroy
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
What's 100% of NOTHING. ;-)
;)
Besides, you are taxed if you BUY a distribution from a STORE. Here in Ontario Canada, if you bought Linux in a store, you would be charged 7% PST and 8% GST. But it's FREE software...
In a store, though, you are not buying that Linux distro. You are buying the packaging, the medium, the service of bringing it to the store and to you, the clerk earning minimum wage that sneeres that you as you walk out of the store, and a lot of other tangable things. Again, the SOFTWARE is free, the retail packaging is not.
It would be widely unfair if, for instance, they imposed a tax simply for running software. That is silly and will never happen.
Think people. Fuck, it's like the whole world is having this massive brain drain. Another person posted, already, that when shipping their Linux CD's they over-value on the shipping label and some countries duties will add upwards of $50 onto the price... but you ARE paying for shipping.
Slackware 7.1 cost me $5.00. $2.00 for the blank CD, and roughly $3.00 in ISP connection fees. ALL of that was taxed and paid in full. So no matter HOW you get the software, you WILL be taxed for it. But you did get a service (your ISP) or a product (the CD) from someone which the government, in our world, has a right to tax.
Bye now
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
I think hey! was referring to Adam Smith's puzzle over why diamonds
should be valued more highly than water, when the first is a dispensable
trinket and the last is the most urgent necessity. The answer is that
value has more to do with availability than usefulness.
How are they planning to do that? I for one wouldn't mind paying 50% taxes on a 0 dollar purchase...
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Next on the agenda: taxing the air we breathe.
"Its to ensure good air quality," states one government official.
...demand a sun tax! We nolonger can afford to compete against this free source of energy!
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
i tried to run linuxnews.pl and nothing happened.
bash$./linuxnews.pl
error: are you a fuckin' idiot
bash$
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
True enough. I was going to try to figure out the per-minute fee break-even point, but I got distracted with work. Still, the post I replied to was from a Canadian. I'm just an ignorant 'merican, but I thought Canada has flat-rate 'net access like we do down here.
Your post got me wondering how long it would take to download the CD image. A CD holds about 650 MB, and with a 56K dial-up getting 5KB/s download speed, that works out to about 36 hours per CD. It seems to me a CD burner would "pay for itself" pretty quickly...
Residents of Poland,
Download the ISOs of any free software you want.
Have the man try and tax that!
If you need ISOs, I will make them for you and put them to you.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
candy and chocolate ARE taxed higher than water: water is a basic product you NEED for washing and drinking. You need the stuff to live. Candy and chocolate are not needed, and are taxed at the higher rate.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
The concept is rather similar to several of the taxes we have in Sweden. You are often taxed by the perceived value of something that you own or have the use of. For example, we pay a property tax that is related to what our house MAY bring IF we sell it. That is, if you own a small house by the seaside, you are taxed by what similar houses have been sold for - even if you have owned your house for 50 years, and never made a penny out of it. In such a context, it's not at all hard to understand the Polish reasoning: the value of StarOffice is about the same as the value of MS Office (which is true, btw), so you should pay a similar amount for having the use of it. Of course, it's absurd, but many taxes are...
I have no idea were the hell your getting this sofware has no market value thing.
Oh, it has a market value -- a market value of zero.
Windows has a postive market value. Red Hat Linux has a price of zero (above duplication costs). The reason is that outfits like Cheapbytes can supply me with Red Hat 7.0 that is identical to "Official" Red Hat.
The cost of producing the software, is reflected in the price.
Not really. If that were true, software companies would never go out of business. In fact I will charge as much as the market will bear, and if that covers my costs plus normal profit I stay in business, if not I go bust unless I have other revenue sources.
If you get no payment/utility from making your software then you loose the oportunity cost value for that software.
The problem is that decisions are made on marginal profit. With free software, once the software is released under a free license the supply is infinitely price elastic - as much will be produced as anyone could please. What we have here is a kind of mirror to Ricardo's analysis of rent. Ricardo showed that because prime land is price inelastic, the landlord (as opposed to the tenant) would receive the benefit of all the lands greater productivity over poorer land (in other words it's not that the landlords are evil and greedy --it's just a scientific fact of life that landlords win and tenants lose). In the price demand graph, the price "curve" for land is a vertical line (price on the Y axis, supply on the X axis). With free software, the production curve is a horizontal line pegged at reproduction costs. This means that, in your bottled air example, that if there were a market for bottled air you couldn't charge more than the cost of the bottle plus normal profit.
In this situation the consumer wins and the producer loses when you only take the sales of the commodity into account. Fortunately, sales are not the only revenue stream for free software companies.
When I play 70 bucks or so for the "official" Red Hat what I am buying is supposedly the unique services that they can provide for installation.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Too bad you have the communist disease into your DNA...
If I do it must be on my mother's side -- my Dad smuggled himself out of China because he didn't want to live in a Communist society. Oh, yes, and sticks and stones may break my bones.
market value is determined by a balance between offer and demand...
Which is exactly my point, expressed in jargon of course.
and then your sig:
PHP consulting for US$ 20 hourly. E-mail me now!
Hmmm. Let's apply some pure economic reasoning to this, shall we? Since first class web developers command much higher consulting fees, what does this tell us about your coding skills?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Similar sorts of things happen in the UK tax system. The taxable value of a car (e.g. supplied to an employee) is based on a list price, and not on the price that the company paid for the car. The list price and the price paid can differ very markedly, and never to the tax-payer's benefit. Why? Months of correspondance with Inland Revenue never got me to the point of understanding it.
Bzzzt. Wrong. It gave the company exclusive rights to access anonymized medical records. I can still access my medical records. It's just that no other company can get a hold of it.
This is because Icelanders have a tendency to emulate their neighbour if he's successful, but don't fully realise that there might not be a market for more of the same given the tiny population. The usual experience has been that both lose.
What the governement was trying to prevent is a goldrush that would've killed off the budding genetic industry before it ever took off. So this is actually a Good Thing(TM).
My spoon is too big.
This statement is flawed. We both agree that the license agreement decreases the utility of the software, but it also decreases the market value. I have been involved in the acquistion of full rights to software packages, and normally these deals are in the millions, albeit usually on paper in the form of stock. This is much higher than the retail or subcription costs of the software that is being acquired.
Quite simply, to purchase full rights to a piece of software, you had better be prepared to pay for the entire cost of development. This is true, even in the Open Source and Fre Software world, where you cannot get full rights to software, but are limited by the agreement given to you. If you want less restrictive rights (such as the right to use code without having to expose your own), then you must pay more.
-no broken link
Well, I don't know anything about Polish Law. But I can see how this might happen: where there are VAT or other taxes on property/transfers, then some sort of fair market value must be used for the taxation. A common method of tax evasion is undervaluing the property. (emphasis mine).
Well, this brings up an interesting point. What you buy when you "buy" software is the right to use the software. The market value of that right, like any other good, depends on the balance between its utility and scarcity.
Normally, people are willing to pay more for something with greater utility, but this ignores scarcity. Nothing has more utility than air but you can't very well tax that as it has no market value. I suppose it should not be surprising, but it is ironic that license agreements actually increase the market value of software by decreasing its utility. That is by restricting user rights to redistribute in particular, the owners of the software create scarcity where none naturally exists.
So, this isn't a case of Grandma's diamond ring (which coincidentally has practically no utility) which has a market value equivalent to more or less similar rings. Free software has no market value, although it has great utility. Like the air, it is in abundant supply and so it is free (as in gratis) despite its utility.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Mind you, you COULD do worse: you could drop Windoze CD's in the bay, and get fined for dumping toxic waste
So buy either an "Enterprise" Linux system - or one CD set per PC. And make sure you get a proper receipt for the Software (-CDs).
Or let a professional company issue you an official "Enterprise license" - in which they state that "you" have aquired an enterprise-wide license to use the software - licenses details provided on the installation media. Let them charge a nominal fee ($1 or so) for issuing this license (technically the cost for printing and shipping) - and make sure they provide a proper receipt.
With this you can prove the actual value of the software (and licenses). A proven value cannot be taxed by a tax officer - he will have to guess the value if no value is given. The latter is standard procedure in nearly any country.
I for example sometimes buy the currentmost (Debian/OpenBSD) CDs - for convenience and to deduct these costs OFF my tax (training material blabla).
I don't know if the laws of Poland are on-line. Feel free to search for the tax laws of Poland.
In this case it seems similar to the USA tax concept of taxing based on value -- if you win a $20,000 car in a contest, you have to pay tax on that $20,000 value (almost as if you had that amount of additional income, except for some gift incantations in the tax code). Even though you paid nothing for the car, you're taxed on the value of the benefit.
Good thing they didn't try to tax it based on the 1980 price of Unix...although it's tempting to try to sell it to that government at that price...
Software companies do go out of business producing software, because you are completly ignoring the fixed cost of producing that software.
So, I can make a more valuable product by hiring inefficient programmers that drive up my development costs? The fact is that development costs do not rationally contribute to the cost of software. I should charge as much money as will maximize my total revenues, and this had better cover my development costs. If the revenue maximizing amount is less than what covers my development costs, it is not rational to charge more than the amount that maximizes my revenues, because by definition this will lower my net revenues. QED.
Linus is continously dumping his new software on the market below cost(his software does not reflect the costs of producing it), every time he releases a bug fix, or a new version. He is doing what microsoft did to netscape, he competes unfairly with his competition.
Sheer twaddle! Linus gets paid to develop Linux -- in satisfaction, prestige etc. He gave it away free so he could get other people to share in its development. When MS gives away its browser for free, it is not to get other people to participate in its development, it is to prevent the development of alternative platforms for consumers to use.
Even as a keynesian, you must admit that there is scarcity for software, since not all the software that could be made has been made.
You are treating the word scarcity in a different way than I am, because you are lumping all the different software in there is or possibly could be into one giant category covering e-mail clients to nuclear plant control systems as if they were fungible commodities. The question is, is there a shortage of Microsoft Excel 2000? The answer is yes, because Microsoft's EULA prevents people from duplicating it. Is this a rational thing for Microsoft to do? Yes -- this is what the copyright laws are supposed to do. If they released Microsoft Excel under GPL, what would the natural price become? Zero.
oh great now we can argue about Ricardo's theories. Not Now, and not here.
Here you commit the same intellectual error as you do with software, as if there were some category of "Ricardian Theory" to which all members are fungible items. The fact is that like Smirth, or even Einstein he was wrong about some things, right about others. His analysis of rent was spot on.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
This weekend I just finished "Free For All" which was reviewed on /. In the last chapter, the author makes some predictions that the current "system" is going to be very threatened by software that flows freely "like dandelion seeds blowing in the wind." Lost tax revenue is going to be a large one. Governments are going to do what they can to tax free software (governments can't resist the urge to tax anything they can get away with). This is a pretty big threat to free software. You can bet the current commercial software giants are going to put pressure behind such efforts. (Which reminds me, we also need to get rid of soft money (the other book I've been reading: How to Overthrow the Government by Arianna Huffington, an advocate for campaign finance reform)).
(My quick review Free for All: If you already know the history of free software/open source, there will be little in this book to learn that is worth the $23, although I did learn some things about BSD history I didn't know. I couldn't picture the general population being interested in most of the detailed explanations. There are a few sloppy mistakes such as confusing free speech vs. free beer in some chapters while explaining it in other chapters. Only in the last chapter does the author attempt to add insights instead of going over dry facts.)
I would like to introduce the Free, But Taxed, Software License. It is essentially the same as the GPL with one additional provision. If you represent, in any way, a government that taxes free software on any basis other than the actual amount paid for the media, you are required to pay the full amount collected in taxes to the copyright holder of the software in order to use it yourself. If the media in question contained software from multiple copyright holders, you are required to pay each of them in full. The copyright holder may agree to waive this fee in exchange for a public apology and repealing the tax.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Then it sounds like smart buyers in Poland will have to buy "naked" PCs, and then install the software themselves.
An even better way to dodge the VAT would be to set up a service that sold bundles of unassembled OEM components known to work well together. Hmmm... could the VAT actually be a good thing, in that it would encourage DIY and tinkering in this way?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Kids always think their dad does the coolest thing. I had a friend who's dad was a doctor. He said it was the best because he could be sick for nothing. My dad is a minister so I told him I could be good for nothing.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Okay, if a product is free, then they want to tax it at the price of an equivalent product. I can follow that logic, even as twisted as it may be.
Here's the solution: Sell open source software. Charge a penny for it. Add 30% tax to the penny and round down -- it still costs one cent.
Governments need to learn that there are some things they cannot control. The public can find ways around nearly every regulation that isn't enforced with violence.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
This is meant to be a means of protection against tax abuse, e.g if you sell a car, you have to pay tax taking as a base the price you sold the car at or the "table value", . Now this protection has become a weapon against users of free software, which is a thing with it's own culture with little care of revenue board officers' concern about specific laws, tax offences, commercial gain, taxes etc.
-- http://www.argante.org -- *the* OS
Actually, Tuvalo sold their TLD to a company called DotTV. See this story.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
How can you tax something that is Free? Using the tax you would pay on another product just aint right... If there is no money being made why tax? And how do you Tax a free product anyhoo if no one buys it how do u track its usage. Stuff like this makes me angry
If we refuse to be flexible, we are in effect opting out of the game of life. The world moves on without us.
Obviously this is ridiculous, and the tax office don't understand the situation:
the software is free, and no benefit is directly conferred (i.e. it's always free, so there's no benefit) - it is not analagous to a 'free' company car or whatever
the valuations are incorrect: Star Office is not as good as MS Office (this is not flamebait, this is simple statement of the facts); similarly Windows is in many ways more valuable than Linux (from a management perspective; in addition, the product is more advanced too - IIS, for example, since it is integrated into the NT kernel, is faster than Apache).
Free Anne Tomlinson!!
Before the whole free beer / free speech argument comes up, let me point out that the article specificly said they were talking about both kinds of free, so the scenario I mention *is* relevant.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Metropolitan France is basically European France. Offilially, it does not include French Guiana (.gf), Guadeloupe (.gp), Martinique (.mq), New Caledonia (.nc), French Polynesia (.pf), Saint Pierre and Miquelon (.pm), Reunion (.re), French Southern Territories (.tf), Wallis and Futana Islands (.wf), or Mayotte (.yt). Properly, all of these overseas "territories" are integral parts of France...
However, free (gratis) software is an entirely different thing. You cannot sell it, because no one will pay for what you can get for $0. If anyone can get it at zero cost, its taxable value is zero. It's not like a company car or a lottery prize, which only a few privileged people get.
Will you get a valuable benefit from free software? Sure! But is that benefit taxable? If it is, the next thing will be taxing fuel-efficient cars, because you spend less money buying fuel for them; that's a valuable benefit, too!
Yes, the US estate tax is intentionally coercive. It encourages the rich to distribute their wealth charitably rather than create lazy inheritors. It's not fair capitalism, but neither is reposessing people's houses, building a baseball stadium, and giving it to a rich frat boy with good family connections. Of the two, I'm more opposed to corporate giveaways.
GIVE you a car, free and clear, the transaction still requires that you pay taxesRiddle me this: if the government stopped taxing large gifts, exactly how many seconds would it take before all executive salaries were eliminated and replaced by weekly "gifts"? 'nuff said.
my car is paid off, yet every year, I still have to pay the countyGee, I don't suppose the county uses that money to build the roads that you drive on? But what if you don't even drive that car? In that case, what the US really ought to do instead is charge $1 or 2 per gallon gasoline tax, like all the other western nations, so that people pay a fair share for their use of public resources.
Americans bitch too much about taxes. We have it easy compared to most countries (with a similar standard of living). Heck, even compared to many lower-ranked countries -- wasn't that the whole point of this Poland article?Since prostitutes charge for sex, and married people get sex for free, they should pay a tax on sex, based on what prostitutes charge.
They don't say how the tax is evaluated. If it were a sales tax, then they would just tax shrink-wrapped CDs and be done with it. It sounds to me like it is probably a "property tax". This is where you have to evaluate the value of all your property and pay a percentage on it. These are the most unfair types of taxes, because when you fall into poverty, not only do you lose your source of income, you have to continue paying taxes on all the stuff you own.
Assuming that they have extensive property taxes, their problem has nothing to do with attitudes towards free software. They need a fairer tax system accross the board--either a sales tax or an income tax; something non regressive.
Since it would be difficult for taxpayers to reform the system right away, they are forced to argue that the software has no value (obviously not true) or that it has less value than NT/office (may or may not be true, difficult to evaluate). The officer probably looked at the systems, reasoned that they do essentially the same thing, and evaluated them the same. It's actually kind of a backhanded compliment to the packages in question. For now, the taxpayer might want to ask for separate evaluations on the hardware and software, so that they can dispute one but not the other. What's tax court like on Poland?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
A lot of people seem to think this is happening in the US. It isn't. If you'd read the article, it clearly states that this is happening in Poland.
That said, who are we (as Americans, probably the majority of the readers on Slashdot) to say how another government should be run? They are coming from a different background, they have a different history, they have different laws. The cry of "Free software should be free!" can be heard from everyone in here, but that's a very culturocentric (doubt that's even a word) perspective.
The US and your culture...they are not the end-all be-all.
A year or 2 ago, I ordered a few RedHat 6.2 CD's from www.lsl.com, I live in Canada, and when they arrived, I was charged $30 duty on them, the assesed value of the CD's was $220 a piece, even I only paid $2 each for them. This is not a new thing, they have been doing it for awhile here...
Except that you cannot put that seaside house up on a web site so a million people could all download it and live in their own identical copies.
Real estate has a "fair market value" because it is inherently limited in quantity. That's what the word "real" is all about. The uniqueness of any given property automatically gives it value.
Free software has infinite supply and negligible costs. Any first year Economics textbook will tell you that its perceived value should be (near) zero.
...there aren't that many well-reasoned responses here that are actually opposed to this nonsense.
Several people have pointed out that this has been predicted in "Free For All" and elsewhere, which is nice, but what to do about it? Some pointed out that taxation of real estate is based on perceived valuation if the property were sold -however, real estate is the only property treated this way in most places I know of.
Certainly Microsoft and other commercial software companies will put pressure on governments to do this sort of thing, as it will hurt the popularity of free software, and yes perhaps charging $0.01 for the license is one way around this... And, yes, it's Poland's own business but frankly the world is getting smaller and we owe it to ourselves and our friends in Poland to - as the first international political force with easy real-time communications among us - band together and oppose all governmental and big-business activities that threaten the society we wish to have on the Internet.
So, some issues seem to be getting ignored here.
One problem is that this poses a huge threat to the free exchange of ideas, especially if applied to the university setting (though students and universities are often given tax breaks)... MANY in the R&D community thrive on free software, and much of it has been written by researchers and hackers for community use based on a barter-like notion of roughly equal contribution from the community (in the form of patches, suggestions, bug reports, publicity, etc.) in return for use. It may thus be necessary to codify this into licenses: anyone who contributes to the software in any ways listed by the author are considered to be "creators" of the software and can not be taxed for using their own creation. Contributions could include applying the system to novel uses and reporting this back, promoting the system for use by others, etc. which would cover some end-users, too.
The government (in Poland in this case) is denying software creators the ability to set the valuation of their own software. If the government gets involved in price-fixing for taxation purposes, the competitive nature of the market that is allegedly a crucial part of the caplitalist system is undermined. If Microsoft and others can't provide value that makes their software worth more than $0 software, that's their problem. To get around this argument a government would need a complex system of taxation based on value to the enterprise using some pre and post installation performance metrics of the task being performed with the program and its value to the organization. Basing the tax on the price of "competing" products is government-assisted price collusion. Furthermore, it ignores the fact that there are reasons why commercial software costs money that do not apply to free software: centralized support, guarantees and warranties and some coherent - and monied - organization to sue if needed, etc. The value of the products is likely not actually the same if anything but a naive economic view (or a purely technical view of the operations of the software) is taken.
This kind of taxation is a kind of protectionism for large software corporations, and threatens to undermine the quality of software and stifle competition as people will come to expect governments to enforce the prices of software, and even commercial companies with competitive pricing can be hurt in such a scenario. Basically, everyone will be expected to charge the same price for their software or otherwise turn-over a larger portion of their profits to the government. Commercial organizations and free software developers alike would cringe at the thought of the government making more money than they do off their work - basically it seeks to undermine the community spirit that built the movement and force commercialization (and a fixed pricing regieme) in the industry, as well as to limit price competitiveness. It actually *encourages* price collusion and other anti-capitalist measures.
The Polish government is taking an outdated view of taxation which will be hard for governments to shake: that goods are the cornerstone of taxation. The US is already a service-based economy, so the US is quite happy to tax support services, installation services, etc. which can come with free software.
It is taxing a form of free speech, which I suspect the Polish constitution has provisions for because (having read part of it) it seems somewhat modeled on the US constitution... Basically, software, like books or music, is a form of creative expression. If I write a book and give it to you for free, if the government decides it's as entertaining as a $30 Steven King novel, should they be able to go and tax you for a $30 purchase you never made? It both forces you to consume, and stifles the ability of authors to freely distribute their ideas.
Finally, it undermines the licensing contract and thus any claims Poland could have to upholding such contract law. Basically, it gives the government the power to rewrite commercial contracts at will to suit its "needs"...
o/~ we are pissed, we are pissed, we have to resist... o/~ - ec8or
Once upon a time, I thought that only my native country had venial & corrupt politicinas whose actions favored the rich. Then I started reading the Internet, & the horror stories started to change my mind.
Since then, I've come to determine the only countries that are actually & proveably better run than mine are those (1) I've never been to, (2) I've never heard a complaint from a local about, & (3) have never made the news for some stupid act of its politicians. Right now the list of places with wonderful governments is down to Iceland, Latvia & Andorra.
Anyone want to post a horror story about one of these & prove me wrong? I figure it's only a matter of time.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
I wonder how they will tax a subscription to Office X from Microsoft? It is NOT software but a subscription. But with the M$ EULAs, you really don't own it but are using a copy. So the tax bill should go to the owner(Microsoft) and not the user.
Speaking from my own experience from these parts of the world (though not exactly in the same country): This means that the treasury officer did not get his monthly share under the table. If he could he could have assigned the biggest fine possible. Just in case he is not forgotten the next time. He has kidz to feed ya know.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
What other FREE things are there that are taxed?
Why does this idea have the same ring in my ear that the USPS internet tax does?
On a lighter note, it would be hard to re-enact the Boston Tea Party substituting free software as the cause. What do we do, chuck our RH5.2 and 6.0 cd's into the bay?
"A group of bearded men dressed insensitively as native americans further polluted the bay by dropping large amounts of unwanted compact discs into the water. The zealots attempted to sneak away, but were apprehended. "
%kill -9 taxation
process taxation cannot be killed
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
When are we holding elections again? ;)
-Omar