

The Strength of the Academic Enterprise - omouse
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/EWD1175.html

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omouse
The most relevant part for people here:

"...co-operation between the university and industry, however, is so much
harder that it usually fails. We might even conclude that the effort is
hopeless.

To begin with, there is the great difference in Buxton Index. For industry,
the Buxton Index is less than 10, probably closer to 4 or 5, whereas for the
academic scientist the Buxton Index is closer to, say, 50, for what you offer
your students should last a lifetime, their lives, to be precise.

The second problem has to do with the openness, which is a hallmark of the
university, whereas, like the guilds, industry tends to see its knowledge as
trade secret. People have tried to find legal solutions for this dilemma, but
I am afraid that such solutions only touch the surface: at a more profound
level, either one of the parties forsakes its duty, or the co-operation
collapses.

But the greatest limitation on the usefulness of co-operation between industry
and academia is almost certainly that the two have completely different
purposes. To quote Harvey Earl of GM: "General Motors is in business for only
one reason. To make money. In order to do that we make cars. But if we could
make money by making garbage cans, we would make garbage cans.". Some people
might argue that they even tried to make money by making garbage. But the
product is secondary; to quote Harvey Earl again: "Listen, I'd put smokestacks
right in the middle of the sons of bitches if I thought I could sell more
cars.". These quotations are from the fifties, but things have not changed
that much. For instance, computing science has very convincingly shown that
simplicity is a necessary precondition for reliability, but industry willfully
complicates products so as to make them proprietary. The disgraceful state of
affairs is fully revealed by the traditional disclaimer with which industrial
software is sold."

