[Haskell-cafe] Re: List of authors happy to have work moved to theHaskell wiki

[apfelmus]

Ian Lynagh wrote:
> If you publish something under licence A, you still remain the copyright
> holder, and can later also publish it under licence B. You can also
> publish it combined with other material under licence B.
> 
> For example, if you were to write a couple of pages on type systems to
> the haskell-cafe list, publish it under the "Simple Permissive License",
> you could still publish a book on Haskell, including your text on type
> systems, under a more traditional proprietary licence. People would
> still be able to copy (etc) your type systems text, but would not be
> able to copy (etc) the other material in your book.

It appears that most publishers want an exclusive license to the
published work, i.e. you have to transfer them your copyright. In other
words, the publishers won't accept your work if you already published it
somewhere else. A Simple Permissive License will most likely disable
possible negotiations with the publisher to make them publish anyway in
that case. Eric Weisstein's Mathworld has been bitten quite painfully by
such copyright transfer, although in the other direction

  http://mathworld.wolfram.com/about/erics_commentary.html

In the end, copyright and laws in general aren't for the case when
everybody behaves nicely, but for the case when things go awfully wrong.

Regards,
apfelmus