Personally, I am all in favor of increasing commercialisation of academic research, if and only if the money earned goes first and foremost to reducing tuition for students.
Alas, tuition seems to ever inflate upwards. I remember when my university built a football stadium- all sorts of talking points were floated about, like how the sports programs pay for themselves, it's good for recruiting, we wouldn't get increased tuition, blah blah blah. Well, once construction finished, guess what? Students got a $400 stadium "fee" added onto enrollment each semester. Sure, it wasn't technically part of tuition, but it also wasn't optional.
That alone pretty much guaranteed that I ignored every attempt from the alumni association that came begging for donations after I graduated. They run a well oiled machine, and yet somehow no matter how much money the school had, students kept paying more each year.
So, yeah, I do know many (most?) research schools have commercializing offices dedicated to making money off of their research, and they have every incentive to keep doing so, whether via parents or keeping things secret to commercial partners. They just don't do anything publicly visible with the money.
Edit: sorry for the stream of consciousnesses, I'm running on an hour of sleep and just realized I don't have the energy for a coherent, concise response
My limited understanding (finance side) is that most customers prefer to buy from (even open-source) companies, for several reasons:
1) They don't have time/desire to assemble hundreds of components, prefering drop-in solution
2) Our manufacturing facility has experience / protools, produces products within tighter tolerances
3) Many people understand their own manufacturing limitations and would prefer warranted solutions, without their understood dangers of DIY
I personally dropped out of US grad school because it was the antithesis of open-source licensing.
Disclosure: I am an AMD shareholder, excited about this recent announcement
