I'm not saying that it's the best arrangement, but that's how it works now. Most university research are publicly funded via the National Science Foundation (NS

I'm not saying that it's the best arrangement, but that's how it works now. Most university research are publicly funded via the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). So without such funding, most research will be grounded. Companies like Yahoo!, Google, Sun Microsystems (RIP), Akamai, etc, were/are the result of publicly-funded research.