this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
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Technology
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Licensed CC0. Assholes.
Why assholes?
Because it's a gift to corporations at the expense of taxpayers.
It means that any company can take that code, modify it (as would be required every year per IRS tax changes), and resell it without being required to publish the source code changes.
What many European countries are doing is requiring the government to publish code under a copyleft license. That would allow companies to also benefit from this code to make their own tools (which they could also sell), and it would require them to publish the source code of their improvements.
Basically copyleft legally ensures collaboration. Public domain does not.
For profit companies can take it, close source it, and make it paid software. Which is why GPL is superior.
But people can keep developing an open-source version, right?
Yeah but people can be stupid bastards. For some reason some people would rather get it from TurboTax than they would a github repo
Yeah. I see. Thanks for the replies.