Heise had the following story on 2003-12-10:
- Studie: Microsoft als Jobmotor
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/tol-10.12.03-002/ Das Muenster Institute of Computational Economics (MICE) an der Universität Münster hatte im Auftrag von Microsoft Deutschland errechnet, dass sich bei den untersuchten Partnerunternehmen 11,2 Milliarden Euro Umsatz auf die Verbindung mit Microsoft zurückführen lassen. Damit könnten jedem Euro Umsatz von Microsoft selbst rund 7,5 Euro Umsatz bei den Partnern zugerechnet werden. Generell liege der Umsatz der Microsoft-Partner über dem Durchschnitt auf dem IT-Markt.
See the studies
In these treatises you can find unmotivated and unsubstantiated assertions about the importantce of patents for a "healthy software industry" at serveral locations, e.g. on page 31 of the "OpenSource" treatise.
In general the authors strive to adorn various Microsft PR assertions with an aura of science without subjecting them to the test of scientific scrutiny.
This study is reminiscent of a series of current attempts at presenting "open source" as a communist phenomenon and software patents as a necessary corollary of capitalism, thereby hoping to achieve by means of ideologisation what can not be achieved by means of more respectable scholarly methods.
The institute advertises its treatises as a scientific achievement on its MICE front page.
It also advertises proprietary MS-only software which it is developping for field of economics in order to "help make economic theory more easily accessible to end-users". Many of the articles written by MICE members revolve around this software
The MICE OpenSource treatise says that universities should not be encouraged to develop free software and that such software tends to cater to the taste of developers and to ignore the needs of end-users. However in science, peer review is important, and the peers of the MICE developers are other developers, i.e. other economists. As the MICE mission page says about the near future:
- What we now call computational economics will be an integrated part of economics.
Making software proprietary means making economics proprietary, i.e. removing science from peer review.
Universities in Germany are currently under heavy pressure to finance themselves. At the same time there is a pressure from the scientific community to allow peer review, i.e. open source development. Some of the researchers who are caught in the middle between these two demands may tend to react nervously or to see monetary reward as the only valid incentive for science, just as for software.
The main author of the studies, Dr. Stefan Kooths, is listed as head of the team.
Dr. Kooths, has been parliamentary candidate of the liberal democratic party (FDP) of North-Rhine-Westfalia, see
and as such advertising an belief system in which everything in society should be determined by individuals subject to private monetary incentives, and claiming that this belief system is related to Mr. Kooth's background as a scholar in macro-economics.
