Depending on whether my wife can watch our son that night or not, I'll try to make it. Sounds like fun!

This post reminds me of an idea I had recently. If patents are based on the idea that this is a new invention, something that is novel, but they are also contingent upon their not being "prior art," then why not just create the "prior art of everything"? What do I mean? I'm not a programmer, but from what little I know about programming, I'm guessing a programmer could relatively easily grab an electronic dictionary and using the logic in the article linked to in this post, wordscramble every noun with every adjective in the dictionary to create the prior art of everything. For example:

Claim 1) A [noun] consisting of:

* a [adjective] [noun],

* with [adjective] [noun] [noun]

You then use software to fill in the blanks with every possible word option:

Claim 1) A [computer] consisting of:

* a [grumpy] [fish],

* with [cloudy] [metal] [socks]

Run all of these permutations through, post them online with a time stamp and under the GPL code, et voila, the prior art of everything! Wait a year and a day and you can now claim every software patent is worthless because there is "prior art" - and all you have to do is reference the website that has the "prior art of everything." Hell, that should be the website: "priorartofeverything.com"

Then, whenever anyone files a software patent, point to "priorartofeverything.com" and say, "Nope. Someone already had that idea."

The end of software patents....

Web definitions
o Slashdot, sometimes abbreviated as /., is a technology-related news website owned by SourceForge, Inc. ...
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o The act of self mutilation by an individual addicted to overclocking

I'm the primary author of this wikibook: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Sociology (Introduction to Sociology). I wrote the initial version as a graduate student when: (1) I felt really guilty about making non-Sociology majors buy $100 textbooks that I was pretty sure they would never use again and sell back to the bookstore for about $10. (2) I came across Wikibooks and realized they had all the tools I needed to create a good textbook, plus, you can copy content from Wikipedia to get yourself started. (3) I had not experienced the textbook publisher's most effective tool for keeping professors assigning expensive books - complimentary copies for professors. I now receive dozens of "free" books every year from publishers. They, of course, give them to us for free so we don't know how much they will cost our students. (4) I was also really annoyed by the new-edition-every-other-year approach of the big publishers, which is just a ploy to make them more money!! Less than 5% of the content changes in textbooks that are published every other year. It's not about "the latest research"; it's about money for the publishers. I wrote up my initial experience with my textbook and published it here: http://www.sociology.org/content/2007/_cragun_futureoftextbooks.pdf If you have specific questions about this process, I'll happily answer them. As for your general questions about the experience... Well, you've already written a textbook, so you know it can be very time consuming. That's the first issue. The second issue is one that other people have mentioned - free, electronic books aren't always considered "legitimate" by academics. Why $$$=quality in the minds of professors, I don't know, but it seems to. As a result, people aren't always keen to adopt your book. Plus, and this isn't really an issue for you as you aren't in an academic position, despite the fact that my book is being used at 10-15 universities and has even been translated into a couple of different languages, it doesn't count as a publication. I'm not sure why. Once I get tenure, I will lobby for ebooks to count as publications for junior colleagues. Another major issue - if you do go the collaborative route (e.g., wikibooks), don't expect tons of collaboration. I don't know why more people haven't contributed to the text, but if you check the edit history of my wikibook, almost all of the editing has been done by yours truly. I even know a couple of the people who have adopted my text and they have said they will contribute, but they haven't done much (there are some exceptions, of course). So, I wouldn't expect a lot of collaboration unless you arrange it ahead of time. I'm still hoping that it will happen one day. Any other questions?