The IRS vs. Open Source 356
simonstl writes "The IRS wasn't after just the Tea Party, Progressives, or Medical Marijuana: Open Source Software was a regular on IRS watch lists from 2010 to 2012. Did they think it was a for-profit scam, or did they just not understand the approach?"
Re:Open source equates to freedom. (Score:3, Interesting)
Open Source makes it harder(not impossible) to do this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY [wikipedia.org]
Re:Tax dodge (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, primarily because Congress can't find its ass with both hands. :-) But also because income tax was set up by the 16th Amendment [wikipedia.org] to the Constitution, and major change would require an additional constitutional amendment. Well, in my opinion anyway. (recent precedent has been to just ignore the Constitution when it gets in the way.)
Re:Open source equates to freedom. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Open source equates to freedom. (Score:4, Interesting)
Why would the freest country in the world (except, perhaps, Iceland) be against it?
According to the 2013 Index of Economic Freedom [heritage.org], produced by the Heritage Foundation in partnership with the Wall Street Journal, the United States and Iceland are, respectively, the 10th and 23rd freest countries.
The top 10 positions are:
In addition to current rankings the index also reports trends. For example, economic freedom in the United States has declined since 2009, according to the graph on this page [heritage.org]. In comparison, freedom in Chile is high and continues to climb [heritage.org], which makes it a popular destination for American expatriates such as "Simon Black" over at his Sovereign Man [sovereignman.com] website.
Re:Open source cuts their revenue model (Score:5, Interesting)
They collect Income, Property, etc tax on the value of goods Sold. For every Open Office installation, there is a direct loss of a potential cut of the Income Tax from Redmond Washington. Many states also have Sales Tax revenue reductions.
Open Source Software is a direct threat to their revenue model.
Re:Open Source is similar to the Tea Party ... (Score:1, Interesting)
It is interesting how the tide is turning against "Progressives" (and I hate to even say that word, what makes them progressive is beyond me). Two years ago your post would have been modded so far down on /. that it might have emerged on the other side of the world.
BTW, I agree with your sentiments 100 percent.
Re:Open source equates to freedom. (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, but the government doesn't need to put in flaws, they can just keep them secret.
Several years back there was a bit of mystery around the Map the Internet project. They would basically ping every IPv4 address to see what responded. Some admins, being either crazy or stupid, would treat this as a malicious attack and attempt to do something about this evil attacker who pinged their box, so early on the learned to harden their box as much as possible. The made hacking the mapping box a goal in itself, and so eventually they were running SecureBSD stripped to just Ping and SSH, which kept them up and pinging.
However, at one point the hardened box did go down, with no logs or evidence on the box what happened. The router logs showed traffic from a WindowsNT box in the office, but the box happened to be powered off at the time. The project just rebooted and moved on, but the mystery lasted.
In hindsight it's no mystery - SSL has had a couple of critical security fixes since, and the router in question turned out to have a Cisco backdoor (or something equally silly, it's been a while) and other weaknesses long since fixed. But it was years before these weaknesses were discovered - the oddest part really was that someone was willing to show off by using them, but at the time bringing that mapping box down was quite the trophy.
Re:Open source equates to freedom. (Score:3, Interesting)
That's what I've been telling people since the beginning. The IRS is/was in an impossible position. If it didn't investigate every group which applied for a tax exempt status, then people would whine about them not doing their job.
Baloney. People are not upset at the IRS for being picky. They are upset at them being partisan. Your claim that they "looked at groups from both sides" is more baloney. Sure they looked at a handful of progressive groups, but the tea party groups were subjected to far more scrutiny.
Baloney on your baloney. Just because a) progressive groups had more affairs in order, having existed since at least the 2008 time frame and b) progressive groups complied with the requests for documentation and c) progressives dont have an axe to grind about the IRS, does NOT mean progressive groups were given a free pass. Your confirmation bias speaks volumes.
Tea party supporters are anti-tax, for fucks sake it's in the name of their organization. How anyone could look at them and think they don't deserve scrutiny when it comes to taxation is just incomprehensible.