Student participation in open source projects (opensource.com)

Most academic projects performed in the Open Source space strive to improve understanding the community in scholarly terms; Open & Free Source, due to a variety of properties - transparency, most prominently, and proximity to the scientific method - lend themselves to this quite well.

However, Open Source is closer to engineering than to science; when we seek out knowledge, we do so to build, not vice-versa. So while overlap exists, it is not surprising that it is not complete.