You are correct in expecting return of public investment. Actually NIH has a policy that explicitly favors "Basic Scientific Research" over applied or applicati

You are correct in expecting return of public investment. Actually NIH has a policy that explicitly favors "Basic Scientific Research" over applied or application of research. According to NSF and NIH, the primary goal of government funded research is advancement of science, this is done via conducting experiments, and publishing results at peer reviewed venues. The peer review both during grant application and at publication stage factors heavily into assessment by funding agencies. If tomorrow NSF were to give significant weight to availability of source code (They actually do that to a small extent), it might set up perverse incentives. A small percentage of federally funded research goes into Computer Science and even a smaller fraction involves results where there is enough demand for software. Another aspect of academic funding that people don't get is that research grants unlike say contracts have a significantly different set of expectations associated with them. E.g. a student can get NSF Fellowship, claiming he want to cure diseases using machine learning, only to later spend 3 years working on music recommendation system (True Story!). Regarding the economics study you linked to, I am very much familiar with that study having seen the interview of graduate student on Colbert Report. For non-CS fields the quality of code is anyway so bad that its much more difficult. Further several researchers rely on proprietary tools, which only make this task difficult. In my opinion the correct way is not by having NSF impose rules, but rather by having venues that accept papers (Conference & Journals) insist on providing software. However this is easier said than done, since its a competitive two sided market. Regarding actual licensing issues, I can assure you that GPL is second favorite license of choice favored by University IP departments, the first one being "All rights reserved with modification explicitly forbidden, except for reproduction of experiments."