I suspect this leaves Apress at the "Require all further authors to contractually promise us, in writing, that they are assigning Apress the exclusive right to publish/distribute the content and have not written any legal landmines which contradict this clause into the sections we routinely don't read".
As the person who commissioned the book at Apress, I can give a little insight into how this came about. I had known Mark for a little while and had seen his (then unfinished) work with DiP. I knew about the license conditions, and spent a good few hours talking with Mark via IRC to convince him to sign up to Apress, let us advance him and essentially pay him to finish it.
I vaguely remember some terms that we agreed which made it favorable for Apress for the first few years, to give apress breathing room to recoup the investment we had made in Mark.
I took this to Gary and the rest of the editorial board, proposed why we should do it and how it could happen, and they agreed. I left not long after, but I understand Mark's book went on to several reprints and it seems new editions - all continuing to make for an excellent book.
I'm proud of bringing the book to Apress, and at the time we felt it was a really good match for a smaller pub to be able to do something a little non traditional and fun. I'm glad to see that it's made lots of people a good deal of money - and I'm sure that Apress don't want to lose the stream from one of their star performers. :)
It is hard though to keep making such unique deals as pubs grow- and, yes Joel - unless you are you, dictating terms isn't really something that most tech authors can do, as the secret is that only a very small percentage of tech books truly sell well. But all it takes is one committed editor who's willing to put their neck on the line for a good product-- and i think dip was one of those. :)
That is a likely response. But that will push authors who disagree with that to other publishers.
I've noticed a number of technical books developed in an open manner (though usually not under the GPL) that then sold well. There are also a lot of good people around software these days who strongly believe in the ideals of free and/or open source software. Therefore I suspect that insisting on strict copyright control will lose more sales than it gains. But people will make mistakes as they learn this.
That is the standard Apress contract now. Mark made his initial contract with Apress quite a long time ago when it was a far smaller company where special deals could be made.
Save for time-travel, they can't really do that when they decide to pick up and "publish" a book that's been freely available in electronic form for eight years.
Or it may drive them to offer much lower royalties on books offered that way -- and perhaps only pay them out after the profitability has been established.
I suspect this leaves Apress at the "Require all further authors to contractually promise us, in writing, that they are assigning Apress the exclusive right to publish/distribute the content and have not written any legal landmines which contradict this clause into the sections we routinely don't read".