FSFLA Frees Brazilian Tax Software
May 15, 2007, 18:45 (1 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Bruce Byfield)
[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for
this link. ]
"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..."
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