Ethical obligation to correct other people's mistakes? In the course of some research, my adviser and I noticed that a formula that is widely used in the field has an inaccuracy. It corrects for an effect that doesn't exist, so the correction makes things worse than they would be without it.

This formula was first published in the 1970s, and other people seem to have assumed it was correct. It has since found its way into about 30 papers and a handful of commercial software products.

However, my adviser does not want to publish a correction. He feels it would be bad for him politically and financially. He has a business that would be negatively affected if he makes too many "waves".

What ethical considerations are at play here? If we do end up publishing the results 5 years later, would people be upset that we sat on the data for so long? Is there some sort of compromise.
Keep in mind that science is the process of getting progressively less wrong, and that publicly sharing your knowledge that the correction is inappropriate will help advance the state of the field (I've found this paper to be inspiring in that regard).  

Also, if you're working in a field where your formula is widely known it is likely that someone else will eventually come to the same conclusion that the correction is inappropriate.  Personally, I'd prefer to have a publication record where I correct my own mistakes, rather than having someone else do it for me.  My rationale is that self-correction demonstrates a meticulous approach to research, which is generally viewed as a positive attribute in a researcher.  Not correcting your own mistakes risks the appearance of carelessness, especially if it is known that you had the means of finding and correcting the mistake and did not do so.

I would recommend publishing the revision to the formula as its own finding, complete with examples of how the revision alters the output of the formula and in what circumstances it meaningfully alters the result, rather than as a correction.