[ 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…”