O'Reilly is has been flexible enough to let us crowdsource this and release it freely to the community, but as far as the commercial sales of the print version go, we're following a fairly traditional publishing model.
What author royalties there are will go towards getting print versions of the book to our largest contributors, and then to Ryan and I as editors.
I don't think it would be feasible to split the royalties fairly amongst all our contributors; not only would it be a large overhead, but the actual amounts would be pretty tiny unless you've written a pretty large proportion of the book. And if you do that, we'd be happy to talk to you about sharing some of the royalties.
That's a tough question to answer right now since we don't know how much help we're going to get. I'm expecting Luke and I write at least half of the book–I'd be ecstatic if we got that much help.
On the other hand, should contributions be extremely low, we are still on the hook with O'Reilly to deliver all of the book.
What author royalties there are will go towards getting print versions of the book to our largest contributors, and then to Ryan and I as editors.
I don't think it would be feasible to split the royalties fairly amongst all our contributors; not only would it be a large overhead, but the actual amounts would be pretty tiny unless you've written a pretty large proportion of the book. And if you do that, we'd be happy to talk to you about sharing some of the royalties.