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

[Greg Knittl]

Hi  Blaise,

tomorrow is the march against Monsanto. Very similar situation.
Monsanto getting a chokehold on the food we eat through intellectual 
property.
And it's cheaper than organic food in the (very) short run. So one 
strategy is to try
to make connections with other groups fighting similar issues both to
understand their strategies and to try and combine forces. I think I've even
seen the FSF say something like this.

There are real concrete benefits to using open standards that the
government might care about, or be made to care about. Again I think
it's more long term. It's a pain to write my own spreadsheet to do taxes
and then submit on paper, but there are important long term benefits.
I've been doing this for 9 odd years and it's just text and xml. It migrates
seamlessly. I should be able to rerun those calculations if I have to.
Adjustments to prior years happen and you may want to cross
check the CRA's calculations.
With Capital Gains you have to keep records from initial acquisition to
final disposition of an asset which can be decades.
I can search with grep. I can repurpose it. My Dad's taxes are on
a collection of Windows machines, some lost in the mists of time.
I'm actually hanging on to a physical Windows Vista machine for
some of his taxes because I have no idea how to migrate that.

Same thing for forms. Both parties will get records they can
carry forward much further into the future, can search more
easily, can repurpose etc. I suspect the government uses
some of these (pdf) formats for "security". They think it's
like paper because they think people can't or won't modify it.
I'm not an expert, but my impression is that these are not
cryptographically secure approaches. If there is a way to
apply cryptographic signatures to html5, xml or plain text
formats government could have the best of the non-repudiability of
paper and the flexibility of electronic information.

Greg

On 16-05-19 09:41 AM, Blaise Alleyne wrote:
> 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...