Comment by patmcc

The current US tax law is flipping (with no rollout period) between dev salaries being 100% expensed (over 1 year) and 100% amortized (over 5 or 15 years). You actually could make some distinction between those two poles without being able to perfectly categorize every line of code.

A number of things the government could do:

1) Split it between the two. Need to amortize x% but can expense the rest. Maybe that % is mandated, maybe it depends on industry (i.e. if you make games vs an OS vs a SAAS vs embedded software for cars).

2) Tie it to company size, either headcount or revenue.

3) Allow different categorizations for e.g. R&D, product support, building internal tools, building SAAS for sale, whatever.

4) Roll out any changes gradually over x years.

Tax law, over and over again, uses the idea that there's a distinction between CapEx and OpEx. It's not magically impossible to do the same for software.