Re: [lp-ca-on] Ontario government forms

[Blaise Alleyne]

On 19/05/16 12:46 AM, Sergio Durigan Junior wrote:
> On Wednesday, May 18 2016, Stephen Paul Weber wrote:
> 
>> Really, it's more our responsibility as a community to get software that
>> cane handle the forms in order. Getting tickets with examples filed in the
>> right places is a start.
> 
> I agree it's our responsibility to fight this fight.  I wouldn't say "get the
> software the can handle the forms", but rather ask the government to create
> forms that can be handled by Free Software.
> 

Seems like both are valid, but the technical solution is a temporary workaround
while lobbying the government may or may not work (or may take a long time).

If I'm following this, the reason that free software applications can't
currently handle these forms is that they're based on a hodgepodge of perhaps
proprietary, perhaps undocumented file formats that are inconsistently used or
would need to be reverse engineered or something?

It seems like getting tickets filed in the right places could be a productive
short-term solution, to assist free software projects to handle these forms, but
it's more of a temporary workaround. (It does seem like it's a moving target
too...) That's a solution that takes mostly developer time/attention -- not
convincing a bureaucracy/government to care.

But asking the government to create forms that can be handled by free software
is a better fix -- just might not be easy, so the technical workarounds may help
in the meantime. I'm not sure the government would care about free software per
se, but they might care about accessibility, maybe about choice / not requiring
Canadians to use software from one particular foreign for-profit corporation to
interact with their government... *shrugs*

Still, a lot of work to get people to care in the first place, as opposed to
"what's the problem? It's free (gratuit), isn't it?" but there may be some
arguments that work better than others with that mindset...