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/