Anecdote from a friend. As a student, he reverse-engineered his country's tax application (not sure how he did that), turned it into a programming language, pu

Anecdote from a friend. As a student, he reverse-engineered his country's tax application (not sure how he did that), turned it into a programming language, published the result as open-source along with formal semantics and precise documentation. Apparently, the official implementation was closed source, the state didn't have access to the source and the results were undocumented and nobody understood how it worked. A few years later, the state adopted his application as the backend for the tax computation infrastructure and, if my memory serves, offered him a job. He declined.