Comment by dboreham

That's not what this is about. It's to do with a situation where companies were trying to make the IRS believe that money they spent on S/W dev was a valid R&D expense (so they could claim some R&D credit and hence pay less tax), and the IRS said "nope, that seems to be not valid because we don't see S/W as really R&D". So...some campaign contributions later and voila there is a law saying definitively that S/W does count. Those companies asked for this change. Now, possibly the whole thing got lost in translation and became a terrible bad thing, but most likely not. Often these things need to be read in the context they apply, which is not "globally".