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> So it's a university [mainly] funded by the tax-payer

This is not true, at least for most states. For example, the UW system got 1.2 Billion from the state out of a 6 Billion dollar budget: https://www.wisconsin.edu/about-the-uw-system/

The large majority of most state university funding comes through tuition, research grants, and donations.

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Well the majority of tuition funding is on loan from the federal government and I'm sure a big chunk of that grant money comes from DARPA, NSF, NIH, etc.

That's not necessarily to say their work should be in the public domain but it would still be nice to see them focus on more productive uses of their IP rather than just license fee extraction.

The federal government generally makes a profit on student loans -- (most of them) get paid back eventually.

True. My point was more that their budget would look very different if not for federal guarantees on those (relatively risky) loans.

And patents!

WARF (the designated rights holder for UW patents) gives an annual gift of ~$60M to the University, if I recall correctly.

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