[rjzzleep]

german academics get a lot of money from industry too. but the numbers are absolutely not comparable to the numbers in the us.

this is not always the case as you can see from the nepomuk thing[1]

but to further strengthen your point, in europe program code or implementation is not considered research. european scientific funding is reserved for research, so a lot of the research you see will never be turned into viable products. that notion also exists in german universities. universities of applied sciences see this differently, but people sometimes joke that these are not real universities.

a lot of what was turned into money is actually european inventions. most americans, don't even know that europe has a lead in neuroscience research(that includes countries like spain). or at least used to, most americans also don't know how great the cs dpt of the tu wien(vienna) is for example.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEPOMUK_(framework) rdf based semantic metadata thingie with a cost of 17 million that is now being ditched partly because it's rdf