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Swiss Tax Office distributes Mozilla and OpenOffice

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the taxman-downloadeth dept.

David Gerard writes "From Heise (via Mozillazine: taxpayers in the Swiss canton of Geneva are being given a CD with a French version of Mozilla 1.2.1, OpenOffice.org 1.0.1 and tax program GEtax 2002. Rough English translation from Google." This strikes me as a really cool idea. I already get the cards that tell me to file online rather than fill out paper forms, but it still forces me to buy tax software every year.

2 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. You know... by Spazntwich · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This really doesn't change the fact that if we just had a more simple and less convoluted tax system, we wouldn't even need to worry about complex deductions, brackets, taxable income, credits, etc.

    I'm not advocating a flat tax. Hell, I'm not even sure what I'm advocating, but if we had a more simple tax code, we wouldn't need to spend that money on tax software every year.

    This brings up an interesting point though. Would the makers of Turbo Tax make a move like the RIAA and try to sue the government if we moved to a simple tax system people didn't need software for?

    After all, it would technically be destroying their business model.

  2. Re:IRS and corporate welfare by Gerry+Gleason · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Yes, and the truely objectionable thing about this is as long as the "major tax software distributors" are in control, there is zero prospect that we will be able to do our taxes securly on our OS platforms. I don't even care whether they give away the actual tax software, but what the IRS should do for us is create an open tax platform so they can release all the rules, regulations, forms and proceedures in a form that can be used directly by "generic" tax software.

    What I am imagining here is a system of XML files and XML document types that would have all the data that changes year to year as they update tax laws. This would make and OS tax program practical because you would just have to implement the generic software that uses this raw data, and you wouldn't need an army of tax lawyers and accountants to first digest the tax laws (and do this again each year). Most people would still use the commercial packages on the typical platforms, and this isn't even a guarantee that and OS version would emerge, but at least it would be possible.

    A full OS reference platform might be nice too, but it isn't a requirement.