"The FSFLA, the Latin American branch of the Free Software Foundation, is claiming a last-minute victory in Brazil in its struggle to remove the requirement to use non-free software for filing taxes online. Having reversed-engineered a free command-line program for filing taxes, the FSFLA is jubilantly announcing that it has 'freed the lion'--'lion' being a colloquial term in Brazil for taxes.
"This partial victory comes after months of campaigning. As previously reported, FSFLA launched a campaign in October 2006 against the software--IRPF2007, as it is called in its current version--that the Receita Federal (RF), the Brazilian equivalent of the IRS, provides for electronic filing of taxes. Both the Windows and the Java version, which requires proprietary classes, are non-free, and certain categories of users are required to use one of them. These categories include anybody with an income over R$100,000 ($47,000), or R$69,840 ($32,000) from a rural business, or with profits from sales of goods, rights, stocks, or futures, or a rural business..."
