Absolutely ridiculous indeed. That example is from a month ago for a medium-sized, research-oriented child company of a much larger tech company. They get a lot of funding from grants and collaborations so one could argue it as a way of funneling money from grants back into the larger company's pocket.

I have been trying to find/join/create a organization or group structure for research that would be more open/fair and less susceptible to corruption/waste but it's not visible enough of a problem to get support for it, and too new or odd sounding to get granting body to take a gamble on it.

A non-profit with everyone's salary visible, who work on delayed-release but open-source projects, seems like a good start to me, after all most of the research grant money is public money, it should be visible where it's being spent. Bounties for researchers/the pubic to fix active bugs. And a mandate that the code (or other work) gets released after ~2years no matter what. Commercially-paid early access and support. Harder to make a business around for sure but the amount of projects I have worked on, that don't get released as they are not profitable or the company/university are too lazy to make a profitable license/product around and refuse to just release the IP. I had one project that was patented and then the company is just sitting on it (for almost 10years now) waiting for a competitor to release something similar so they can seek licensing from them. It's heart breaking seeing all that work/energy/money just get locked up in a private gitlab repo to die when some of it can literally save lives or kick a field into the next step.