This is tangentially related to what I'm currently doing. I basically work in EdTech. The company is not an EdTech company, it's a education services company.

This is tangentially related to what I'm currently doing. I basically work in EdTech. The company is not an EdTech company, it's a education services company. I was hired on to develop software that we couldn't find in the market[0]. I'm the process of building this thing, we've been attending and speaking at conferences in our industry. And I'm seeing a lot of the same stories: academia is trying to do research, the research fundamentally requires software to make the research happen, the quality of the software can have a huge impact on results, but because software development is tangential to the research goals, there's little to no allocation to software developers. This leaves the researches to cobble together a solution that maybe kinda fulfills their need, not corky, and certainly not perpetually (a lot of reliance on trial software and services). We would love to offer our software to researchers in our field. We've gotten feedback from several that what we are building is exactly the sort of thing they need. But they have no money, and even if we were in a position to give it away for free, we can't even make those connections come to fruition. So I don't know what to do. I really am thinking of starting to give it away for free, because at least we'd benefit from more research results in our field pricing the efficacy of our approach. But that's a really slow burn. [0] Specifics don't matter, but if you're curious, I make a VR environment for foreign language training emphasizing culture.