Comment Re: Taxpayer-funded should always mean Open Source (Score 1) 69
CERN has a pretty big open hardware library. Have you looked through it?
You're being pretty disingenuous though. CERN is basically a facility that provides services. Most of the scientists who "work at" CERN aren't actually employed by it. They're employed by home universities in many countries, including ones outside Europe. Many of the people who actually do the work and make the inventions are grad students who may well be paying to be there, not the other way around.
Again, "publicly funded" doesn't automatically mean the public owns everything any more than your employer, public or not, owns you. Slavery is illegal, yeah? Many (most?) universities leave IP ownership with the inventors. It's an important part of academic freedom. It's also in line with typical public funding objectives which are:
1. do the most research as cheaply as possible
Sometimes there's a #2 which is:
2. commercialize as much as possible in order to stimulate economic development.
Open sourcing is typically done because scientists think sharing freely is an important part of science, and it's typically done with their own time, money and effort, often in conflict with their best career interests.