IRS Makes Direct File Software Open Source After Trump Tried to Kill It

Cooperating with the law is often percieved as an act of defiance with this administration, though.

I suspect that they’ve been pressured to keep it out of public by turbo tax lobbyists, but with the straight on attempt to kill it lately, they decided just to ignore that pressure and push it out to spite those lobbyists.

Because it's a gift to corporations at the expense of taxpayers.

It means that any company can take that code, modify it (as would be required every year per IRS tax changes), and resell it without being required to publish the source code changes.

What many European countries are doing is requiring the government to publish code under a copyleft license. That would allow companies to also benefit from this code to make their own tools (which they could also sell), and it would require them to publish the source code of their improvements.

Basically copyleft legally ensures collaboration. Public domain does not.