Bug#784405: ITP: rnetclient -- Client to submit the Brazilian Income Tax Report to the Brazilian Tax Authority
[ Cc'ing Thadeu Cascardo, who developed rnetclient and is a DD. ]
On Thursday, May 07 2015, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> On Wed, May 6, 2015, at 01:51, Sergio Durigan Junior wrote:
>> Package: wnpp
>> Severity: wishlist
>> Owner: Sergio Durigan Junior <sergiodj@sergiodj.net>
>>
>> * Package name : rnetclient
>> Version : 2015.1
>> Upstream author : Thadeu Cascardo, Sergio Durigan Junior, Alexandre Oliva
>> * URL : http://wiki.libreplanetbr.org/rnetclient/
>> * License : GPLv3+
>> Programming Lang: C
>> Description : A Client to submit the Brazilian Income Tax Report
>> to the Brazilian Tax Authority
>>
>> rnetclient is a Free Software that can be used to submit the Brazilian
>> Income Tax Report to the Brazilian Tax Authority (Receita Federal). It
>> is the outcome of reverse-engineering ReceitaNet, the official and
>> proprietary software that Receita Federal develops.
>
> What's the real point of this package? One actually needs to install
> the tax-report-building program from RFB (IRPF20xx) to have anything for
> rnetclient to transmit, at which point you might as well install
> ReceitaNet since you're already running RFB-provided java code anyway.
Hey, Henrique!
Thanks for the comments.
The real point of this package is to provide freedom for those who have
to declare their income tax in Brazil. Of course, as you have
mentioned, rnetclient solves one side of the equation, which is
sending the report to the Receita Federal. As for the other side (which
is preparing the report), you do not necessarily have to install the
proprietary version of the program that is published by the Receita
Federal; instead, you can install IRPF-Livre, a Free Software made by
Alexandre Oliva (since 2007):
<http://www.fsfla.org/svn/fsfla/software/irpf-livre-2015/>
Every year, he releases a new code to be tested. The reports generated
by IRPF-Livre can be successfully transmited by rnetclient, as has been
tested by Alexandre Oliva and others. Unfortunately, IRPF-Livre is not
a Debian package (yet?), but then again, the proprietary version is
obviously not on Debian either.
> Also, what's the official position of RFB regarding the existence, and
> use of this program?
There is no official position about both programs so far, to the extent
of my knowledge. What exists (or existed; I don't remember all the
details now) is a lawsuit by Alexandre Oliva who has been trying to make
RFB release the code of the proprietary softwares mentioned above. But
this is offtopic to this discussion, I think.
> Regardless of whether the process of reverse engineering the ReceitaNet
> protocol is legal or not (I don't know, so I am not assuming anything),
IANAL, but in general reverse engineering is not forbidden in Brazil. I
found some documents about this, and I can provide them if needed.
> actually connecting to RFB servers using this program might well not be
> legal.
>
> Not to mention it can cause "harm" to rnetclient users if RFB decides
> that they object to tax reports submited through rnetclient, and we
> might find ourselves in legal trouble over that as well, there's the
> whole "enticing others to use the rnetclient program" angle that could
> be played against Debian (in this case, it might well end up being
> directed at Brazillian DDs since RFB won't be able to target SPI or
> Debian itself).
That is indeed a good point; I don't know if Debian as a project is
willing to take this risk. I mean, there is always a risk of RFB
deciding that they won't accept tax reports made by IRPF-Livre and/or
submitted by rnetclient; in this case, we would have to think in another
option. As I said, Alexandre Oliva has been doing IRPF-Livre since
2007, and last year some people used rnetclient to submit their reports,
and nothing unusual happened. I think it is not very... "dangerous" (I
did not want to use that word, but...) for Debian to have rnetclient on
its repositories, but that is a personal opinion of someone who is
starting to contribute to Debian.
> Also, ReceitaNet is often updated, it went from version 4 (tax report of
> 2014) to version 7 (tax report of 2015), rnetclient would have to be
> kept up-to-date if such changes in ReceitaNet are in any way related to
> the protocol or servers it should connect to submit the tax report.
> This can cause operational issues if rnetclient makes it to Debian
> stable, since the program must be working perfectly during the tax
> submission window.
Yes, that is another good point. I don't know what would be the best
way to solve this. I know rnetclient in stable would probably not be
updated as frequent as it should.
> In fact, the upstream homepage has this notice (loosely translated from
> pt_BR):
> "Version 2015.0 did not support fully the tax report format for 2015.
> This problem has been fixed in version 2015.1. We wait reports of both
> sucessful and non-sucessful use of rnetclient 2015.1 in our mailing
> list".
Yes, but I don't see what's the problem. rnetclient has to be updated
every year according to the proprietary protocol changes that RFB
introduces, so sometimes it takes more than 1 revision to get it right.
The same happens with IRPF-Livre, actually.
> Please clarify the above points. So far, it looks like accepting this in
> Debian is a lot of risk for no real gain.
Let me just say I disagree with the "no real gain", because we are
talking about giving freedom to the users, which is a huge gain.
However, I do agree that we will need to discuss and figure out some
details before choosing how to proceed with this package in Debian. As
I said, IANAL, so maybe we could/should involve debian-legal in the
discussion to see what they think (the problematic part is that we are
dealing with brazilian laws, which may be harder for debian-legal to
comment about). But I think we can try to come up with a solution for
the problem you raised about Debian stable. At least I'm willing to
try.
Thanks again,
--
Sergio
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