The IRS vs. Open Source

simonstl writes "The IRS wasn't after just the Tea Party, Progressives, or Medical Marijuana: Open Source Software was a regular on IRS watch lists from 2010 to 2012. Did they think it was a for-profit scam, or did they just not understand the approach?"

Comments

Re:Open source cuts their revenue model

[Technician]

They collect Income, Property, etc tax on the value of goods Sold. For every Open Office installation, there is a direct loss of a potential cut of the Income Tax from Redmond Washington. Many states also have Sales Tax revenue reductions.

Open Source Software is a direct threat to their revenue model.

Re:Open source equates to freedom.

[lgw]

Sure, but the government doesn't need to put in flaws, they can just keep them secret.

Several years back there was a bit of mystery around the Map the Internet project. They would basically ping every IPv4 address to see what responded. Some admins, being either crazy or stupid, would treat this as a malicious attack and attempt to do something about this evil attacker who pinged their box, so early on the learned to harden their box as much as possible. The made hacking the mapping box a goal in itself, and so eventually they were running SecureBSD stripped to just Ping and SSH, which kept them up and pinging.

However, at one point the hardened box did go down, with no logs or evidence on the box what happened. The router logs showed traffic from a WindowsNT box in the office, but the box happened to be powered off at the time. The project just rebooted and moved on, but the mystery lasted.

In hindsight it's no mystery - SSL has had a couple of critical security fixes since, and the router in question turned out to have a Cisco backdoor (or something equally silly, it's been a while) and other weaknesses long since fixed. But it was years before these weaknesses were discovered - the oddest part really was that someone was willing to show off by using them, but at the time bringing that mapping box down was quite the trophy.