Open Source in University Research

[genus_001]

Does anybody here know if there has been any University that has combined it's CS departments with the EE, ME, and CE department to work towards developing and using open source programs, that may replace commonly used programs like Matlab, Solidworks, and maybe some other smaller programs designed to work with the experiments they are woking on now and for the future.
For some reason, this seems like to me that, this could only help the scientific community.
Is this a reasonable goal that maybe Universities could work together on?

[Whiffle]

I think that may be a hard sell. Most people doing research want to make sense of their data, not figure out how to use a new program (or write a new program) especially if the new program does the same thing they've already bought and paid for. Also, there are many features of such closed source programs that have yet to be implemented in open source. Money isn't much of an issue either, most programs are pretty well funded though. That said, many schools also are supporting open source in other ways.