> If this was open sourced, it had the potential to severely change the software/IT industry.

As an engineering undergrad I had a similar feeling about Matlab & Mathematica.

Matlab especially had 'tool boxes' that you bought as add-ons to do specific engineering calcs and simulations and it was great, but I almost always found myself recreating things in python just because it felt slightly more sane to handle data and glue code.

Pandas and Matplotlib and SciPy all used via an ipython notebook were almost a replacement.