Except turbo tax is trying to move away from linux compatibility. There is another thread on this list where people are complaining about the flash requirement of turbo tax. Flash doesn't bother me so much (though I'd prefer to be without it) but I've used turbo tax online since I first migrated to linux about 3 years ago (and used the install version before that). This year though I had to use the 'user agent switcher' to spoof turbo tax into thinking I was running IE on windows in order for it to let me in. The fact that everything worked perfectly without any problems using firefox on ubuntu really bothers me though. I'll accept the fact that many companies aren't interested in the linux market and don't bother making stuff for linux, but when you have something that *is* compatible with linux and you go out of your way to try to make it incompatible (and fail at that even), well... it becomes time for me to look for another tax service (online or not) which I did this year. I would have felt a little better if I had gotten an error or something while using turbo tax online (would have meant there was a real reason to not use linux with their service) but I successfully used everything up to the point where my taxes were ready to be filed and they wanted me to pay for the service, I then decided to cancel and go elsewhere at that point. Making a FOSS tax program wouldn't be too hard, especially since the USA is big enough and it would benefit so many people there are bound to be enough volunteers. The problem (as mentioned previously) is that in addition to federal taxes you have 50 states with their own tax laws along with the unknown number of counties/cities/whatever as well. All of these will change from time to time and need constant updating. While the USA as a whole is probably big enough to draw enough volunteers to keep federal up to date anything below that will probably not be kept current or accurate. The only way I see something like this working is if the FOSS community built a framework program (as mentioned in previous Emails) that connected to a government maintained publicly available database which stores information on all taxes at all levels of government. This way whenever taxes change due to laws being passed the database is just updated and the program can calculate your taxes correctly. This way the developers can focus on making certain the program remained compatible with the database and interface issues (how questions are asked to the user, etc.). Sadly I don't see our government being willing to maintaining a database like this even though it would help avoid confusion with understanding/calculating taxes even if you didn't use our hypothetical FOSS tax program.
Russell Johnson wrote: > On Apr 15, 2009, at 10:20 PM, Tim Wescott wrote: > >> You're going to spend a lot more time and money on domain experts >> than you >> will on a programming language, particularly when you get to >> addressing >> all the state taxes and potentially the regional (i.e. TriMet). >> > > For several years now, I've filed my taxes with TurboTax online. On > Windows, Linux, and OS X. It worked a treat. > > > Russell Johnson > [email protected] > > > > _______________________________________________ > PLUG mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug > -- Do not be afraid to joust a giant just because some people insist on believing in windmills. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
