Or is it the idea of government funding that bothers you?
Reading his post, it's the idea of the public funding research whose results become private property. If research is publically funded, then the public should benefit freely from the results.
As it is right now, though, while the majority of research is publically funded and occurs at public labs and institutions, the majority of the
profit from that research winds up in the coffers of some very private corporations. There's far too many instances of the fruits of public research simply being given away to private corporations with little or no recompense to the public that originally funded the project.
I don't know what to do about it, though. Universities are in the business of teaching and research. Application and manufacture isn't really their balliwick.
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