As a scientist, I am so very glad every day that someone pays for science. Without sustained support from NSF, DOE, and NIH, there is no way that fundamental research could move forward the way it has in the post-war United States.

It is tricky to figure out how to allocate funds, but software underlies our nation's infrastructure, too. Having federal grants for the maintenance of core open-source infrastructure sure sounds like a cheap investment to me.

>Without sustained support from NSF, DOE, and NIH, there is no way that fundamental research could move forward the way it has in the post-war United States.

One of my favourite scientists of all-time is Harrison Brown. He was most known for his role in launching George Tilton and Clair Patterson's dating-the-Earth project. But he had a most amazing ability to convince the cold-war era US government to fund civilian science that had no real military value whatsoever. He was a kind of science-funding Robin Hood, an ethical con artist.

> the post-war United States.

This might be a bit of a tangent, but the US is still at war and has been (in various stages of "hotness") for many decades). The war in Afghanistan will turn 18 in less than 2 months. More on-topic -- quite a bit of research still gets funding from the military, because of their massive budget (not that I think that this is an overall good thing -- I've heard really worrying stories about the sorts of discussions you have when doing military-funded research).

And if you are not in the US, EU, or an Asian developed country, your stability of funding is pretty much at a level where you are taking an unnecessary and big risk by going into academia as a livelihood.

So, should it not be worth millions? Is calculus not worth millions?

If someone could claim exclusive rights: yes, it would be worth millions. However, we've chosen as a society to make IP law not apply to math and public science.

This is an extremely shortsighted view, just because you can't sell calculus, doesn't mean its value in general isn't titanic.

For instance, it underlies basically all modern science and technology, fundamentally.

The problem with putting a monetary value on something is always that someone either needs to buy it or sell it.

Since calculus already exists and is in the public domain, nobody needs to buy it. No government needs to invest money in it. (Assuming that calculus is a finished work for the moment).

This is, of course, not to say that calculus is not valuable.

A fundamental tenet of Free Software is that math cannot be copyrighted and that software is basically just math. Whether you agree or disagree with that, it's kinda pointless to approach the topic from scratch in 2019, it's been argued into the ground for like 30 years.

The value you get from something has nothing to do with its price. When people say "X is worth Y dollars", "Y dollars" refers to what they can sell it for, not how much "value" its adding to society.

Its not nearly as straight forward of that, think how many dollars calculus has generated.

Yeah, Newton's heirs have a huge check coming to them, when US Congress retroactively pushes copyright back a few centuries by extending it to "life + 300 Years".