a of ~$1 million for advancing math and physics research would be to hire some software developers for a couple of years and make an enterprise-quality successor to TeX. And academics probably have an unusually high desire for open source software, or at least software that’s not entangled with a single company. (The success of the various App stores is good evidence here.) Academics are a small market, so they can’t rely on the zero marginal cost of software to make up for these problems, even in the most important areas. First because it’s difficult to prevent people from copying it, and second because online payments are friction-ful, especially without a reputation system in place. I have long said that the single most effective use I wish I had a good econ-market-failure story to tell about why a better version of TeX hasn’t arisen on its own, but I only have a mediocre one: I suspect that in general software is under supplied because of the difficulty of getting people pay for it. It has been generously funded by the United States Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Andrew W. Zotero is a production of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and the Corporation for Digital Scholarship. Interestingly, Zotero is evidence that custom built academic software funded by charitable foundations can provide a tremendously positive service to the academic community. If you’re an academic, you should consider using Zotero, a piece of software that manages your library of papers (including PDFs with comments), pulls papers automatically from journal websites, syncs across devices, generates bibtex files, and other cool stuff.
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