[Discuss] Finance software for Linux

[tmetro+blu at gmail.com (Tom Metro)]

Bill Bogstad wrote:
> It isn't just the complexity.   It is the constant churn.
> ...any organization putting out tax software has to be prepared to put
> out a new version fairly quickly.

Greg Rundlett wrote:
> The US govt. (IRS) should provide the tax filing software...

One possibility would be to have the government publish the tax rules in
a machine readable format. Then the open source projects could have a
slow, long-running development cycle to build an interpreter for the
rules and a nice UI.

It's not a perfect fix, as a lot of what products like TurboTax bring to
the table is not just the forms and underlying error checking, but user
friendly advice alongside the forms. (Although in many areas they still
do a surprisingly poor job of this, even in areas that haven't changed
in years.)

 -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
The Perl Shop, Newton, MA, USA
"Predictable On-demand Perl Consulting."
http://www.theperlshop.com/