I can't remember if it was in the paper offhand, but in any case Emacs development is not really very cathedral-y.

It's a matter of long debate among grammarians, and I take other grammarians's point of view :-).

I've used both and don't agree. Bazaar's quite good. Not that there's anything wrong with git, either. At this point in their development, I think the old rule is starting to apply: "the smaller the differences, the louder the arguments".

Ok, that's fair -- it could go either way. That's what I get for trying to be too clever!

No matter what word the Vatican used, this is fundamentally about trademarks, not copyrights.

Trademarks are about identity: they prevent impersonation. Identity protection is exactly the Vatican's concern here. They don't want other groups pretending to be the Catholic Church. (There remain interesting questions as to who has the right to decide what the Catholic Church is, as with any religion or other affinity group, but that's an inherent property of identity itself.)

This case is not about copyright, in any case, since copyright isn't about identity. When people illegally share music, for example, they don't remove the original artist's name and replace it with their own. Copyright is not about credit or attribution; it's about the sharing itself. That's why it's called "copyright" instead of "creditright".

Lumping these two unrelated concepts together under the term "intellectual property" just leads to confusion. And the copyright lobby is very happy to benefit from this confusion, since people have a strong moral attachment to accurate crediting. For example, see http://questioncopyright.org/promise#plagiarism-vs-copying for a blatant example of the RIAA trying to confuse copyright violation with plagiarism -- that is, confuse unauthorized sharing with identity theft.

Now, if the Vatican were claiming a monopoly right on the Bible, that would be a copyright issue. But they're not, of course, because the Bible is in the public domain everywhere.

See also the BookLiberator, a somewhat more compact cube-in-cradle design, that's also easy to build. Although soon you won't have to build your own: we're prototyping a manufacturable, flat-packed kit to sell from our online store; see questioncopyright.org/bookliberator for more about the project. It should be ready next year.

None of which is to detract from Reetz's accomplishment, of course. This renaissance in personal book scanners is going to make it easier for all of them, in the long run, especially as we can share the same open source software among all the scanners.

Nothing about setting up a wiki in Drupal... The review doesn't bring it up, and as far as I can tell from the online table of contents, the book doesn't either. That was sort of surprising, for a book about community sites.

-Karl Fogel

For some statistical evidence (built on a very small sample size) that code review is worth it, see this section of a chapter from O'Reilly Media's book Beautiful Teams:

    http://www.red-bean.com/kfogel/beautiful-teams/bt-chapter-21.html#gumption-sink

That section is not about code review per se (it's about how a seemingly trivial interface decision affected code review), but it includes some code review stats from two projects, and discusses how frequently one project's code review catches mistake from previous changes.

(Disclaimer: I wrote the chapter, but it seems pertinent enough to this discussion to be worth posting.)

--Karl Fogel

Andy Oram, an editor at O'Reilly, wrote this essay on Wolfram Alpha and how it fits (or doesn't fit) into the "tech-splicing" revolution:

Results from Wolfram Alpha: All the Questions We Ever Wanted to Ask About Software as a Service

(Disclaimer: Andy is my editor. But it's a good article; check it out.)

A lot of free software documentation is released under free licenses these days. Was this? Or maybe a non-free but still liberal license like CreativeCommons Attribution-NonCommercial or something?

(Might be good to tweak the Slashdot book review guidelines to make stating the license a standard part of these reviews...)

The author is quite right that there should be a carrying cost to copyrights and patents. But take it one step farther: Make the annual registration fee a percentage of an owner-declared total value; then give the public the option to buy out the owner by paying that total value.

For example, I declare my novel to be worth $100,000. My registration fee that year will be $2000 (I'm just using 2% as an example). But at any time during that year, anyone can come along and pay me $100,000 to liberate the work into the public domain, as a mandatory transaction. I've declared the price, so it's a fair price by definition. Each year at re-registration time, I can change that total value, moving it either up or down, to reflect changes in the market value of my work. But having done so, I'm obligated to allow liberation for the declared price at any given time.

Note that this transaction is not a sale of the copyright or patent, it's a liberation. Sales can still take place, as before, and a private sale could be for more or less than the declared public value (because the buyer might want to preserve the monopoly, rather than liberate the work). All the market dynamics that copyrights and patents formerly had, they would still have.

This proposal is described in more detail in http://www.questioncopyright.org/balanced_buyout/