Absolute malarkey. All academic research should use and produce free software. This used to be the case; that it isn't now is terribly stupid, especially now th

Absolute malarkey. All academic research should use and produce free software. This used to be the case; that it isn't now is terribly stupid, especially now that distribution costs have gone from "little" to "nothing." It doesn't "cost" anything to throw a tarball on the internet. Any charity that goes out of its way to produce proprietary software doesn't deserve anyone's money to begin with; they're wasting funds. The product of government-funded academic research is already primarily going to private, for-profit journals, being effectively stolen away from the taxpayer. Proposing that we should make it easier for academic research to completely ignore the common good is ridiculous.