I feel that in the past there were more products shipped by Academics. Unix BSD from Berkley, Minix from Tanembaum, Kermit from Columbia, Pascal from USCD; Pas

I feel that in the past there were more products shipped by Academics. Unix BSD from Berkley, Minix from Tanembaum, Kermit from Columbia, Pascal from USCD; Pascal, Modula and Oberon from N. Wirth, etc. Building these products would be a great teaching tool and contribution to society. Also there could be a lot of research done on how to build complex software where the product is the software itself and it can be applied to other sciences that badly need software. I for one would love to get a graduate degree while building some product where I get to try different software design approaches.