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Ask Slashdot: Successful Software From Academia?
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?"
The title of Linus' thesis is: "Linux: a Portable Operating System" - so yes, it counts.
The real question is, if it is enough that a project can trace it's roots back to a academia - even if >90% was added later and or by developers outside academia. I bet many products considered purely commercial started out started out in the back of the head of students during their studies. Many of those dropped out to build a company rather than stay and write a thesis about it. If you include those, and even consider some studying other majors than CS - your probably looking at the bulk of all software in existence.
Run with the lemmings, and you'll get your feet wet.