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Ask Slashdot: Successful Software From Academia?

Posted by timothy on from the how-about-ncsa-mosaic dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A lot of masters and PhD theses are about development of software targeting the solution or the automation of a specific problem. Bioinformatics, for example, has a lot of journals about software tools that are coded in academic environments; some of this software is the final result of a four-year PhD. But my question is, how much of this software will see the light outside the universities? I know of some examples, like BSD, but they are an exception, right? Is there any list of successful software created entirely inside universities' labs that became widely used?"

3 of 314 comments (clear)

  1. A few... by sl3xd · · Score: 5, Informative

    * Kerberos (Widely used, part of Active Directory)
    * X11
    * AFS (Andrew File System)
    * MACH (Used by GNU HURD and OS X)

    And that's just a starting sample.

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  2. LLVM by Lally+Singh · · Score: 4, Informative

    The backend for quite a few compilers, and a few shader compilers...

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  3. BIND DNS by egamma · · Score: 4, Informative
    I can't believe nobody's said this yet...

    BIND

    BIND was written by Douglas Terry, Mark Painter, David Riggle and Songnian Zhou in the early 1980s at the University of California, Berkeley as a result of a DARPA grant. Versions of BIND through 4.8.3 were maintained by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at UC Berkeley.

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