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