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What does it mean to be funded "with public money". In your example, it sounds like the software was funded with private money then sold as a product to the sch
by gizmo686 8y ago
What does it mean to be funded "with public money". In your example, it sounds like the software was funded with private money then sold as a product to the schools.
The relevant scenario is that the school approached the company and paid them to develop the software.
- da_chicken 8y agoThat's a fair point. I hadn't thought of it that way, it's just what I went to because it's what I'm used to thinking in terms of.
- gizmo686 8y agoIts still not as clear cut as I make it sound. Another potential model is for the government to partially fund development. For instance, if the government wants a piece of software that costs $1,000,000 to develop, a company might offer to develop it for them for $500,000 and the rights to resale it to other customers. This isn't an intractable problem though. You would just need to make a clear delimination between what components the government is paying for, and which ones is coming out of the company's R&D budget. Due to billing, this is already how many of these projects work, but the publicly funded portion is often far less useful without the privately funded portion; and there often is not a good solution to this (think a government funded plugin to Microsoft Excel, where an Excel license costs $5,000)