Another issue is, if you travel somewhere in the U.S. by train, how do you get around once you arrive? Local public transportation is so poor in much of the US (Boston being an exception) that you will probably rent a car. In Europe and Japan the local options make travel by train easier.
That time of the year is upon as again: Tax Season. Where we all enjoy reading about someone moaning that they can't find Free or Open Source tax software.
Tax preparation is a classic case where OSS doesn't work: a tedious problem, lots of state-by-state variation, huge sets of rules that are constantly changing, customers that need hand-holding because they don't understand the underlying rules, and the result is just numbers, not something exciting like a game or yet another media player.
Programmers aren't motivated to provide tax software for traditional OSS principles. The only way to get people to do this is to pay them.
Slashdot Mirror
Another issue is, if you travel somewhere in the U.S. by train, how do you get around once you arrive? Local public transportation is so poor in much of the US (Boston being an exception) that you will probably rent a car. In Europe and Japan the local options make travel by train easier.
Well, maybe not EXACTLY like Japan's? http://news.google.com/news?q=japan+train
That time of the year is upon as again: Tax Season. Where we all enjoy reading about someone moaning that they can't find Free or Open Source tax software.
Tax preparation is a classic case where OSS doesn't work: a tedious problem, lots of state-by-state variation, huge sets of rules that are constantly changing, customers that need hand-holding because they don't understand the underlying rules, and the result is just numbers, not something exciting like a game or yet another media player.
Programmers aren't motivated to provide tax software for traditional OSS principles. The only way to get people to do this is to pay them.
But will the technical details of this be available for OSS or will it be like OpenBSD's experience with Intel's cryptographic hardware?