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Additionally, a number of these research programs take the source code and make a go of a small business product.

And in many cases the universities own the IP associated with the research that goes on in their departments so they keep the source and treat it like a company would treat a trade secret. It's likely Washington will patent this and try to license the patents.

I think we left the topic of "science" about 4 posts up. I don't know what's being described here, but it's not science. Yet somehow, I get the feeling that I'm paying for it.

What's the legal situation with these academic research papers? Am I allowed to implement an algorithm from a research paper and then either sell the software or release it as open source?

I assume other academics are allowed to reimplement methods in order to reproduce the result and to compare to their own methods. Can I do the same as a learning exercise?

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