Mashup Guide

My publisher and I have agreed to release my book under the By-NC-SA 2.5 Creative Commons license. Should we go even further in openness and license under a By-SA license and remove the commercial reuse restrictions? David Wiley's post Why Universities Choose NC, and What You Can Do at iterating toward openness prompted my own comment:

I’m very interested in this issue. I’m currently working on a book to be published by Apress on mashups (http://blog.mashupguide.net/about). The deal I have with my publisher is to publish the book under a By-NC-SA-2.5 license. As David knows, I was debating with myself on what license to choose from among By-NC-SA, By-SA, and the GNU FDL. I finally decided not to go all the way to By-SA because I was afraid that if we didn’t go with the NC restriction, a commercial player could undercut Apress (and me) by taking all the materials and selling it in a more commercially advantageous position. That is, I’m afraid of the prospect of someone printing and selling paper copies at cheaper cost or putting up my book on a commercial site and realizing advertising revenue for cheap (since they did not put in the money to produce the book in the first place.) I will admit that my fears may not be well-founded — so I’m interested in figuring out whether I should revisit the issue of licensing with my publisher. (It’s not that Apress is adverse to publishing books under the GFDL — see http://www.djangobook.com/license/, for instance.) I will say that the incident with Seth Godin’s book did not help with my fears though. (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/02/please_dont_buy.html)

Bottom line: how do I make my work as open as possible while not opening my publisher and me up to being unfairly taken advantage of commercially? I’m not predicting that I’ll be making tons of royalties off my book, but I don’t want to have what little might be coming my way to be taken away either! Since I recently left the long-term employ of the University of California, I’m a bit more dependent on income from writing than I used to be.