Hi benmarks, authors continue to retain royalties and payments as per our agreement at the time of writing. Hopefully with the added benefit of seeing more happy members of the community with copies of their book :)
In the interest of full disclosure; before I begin, I would like to make it known that I am an employee of Packt Publishing.
However, with regard msoad's comment, I would like to make it known that this was a mistake. We do give a royalty to Open Source projects that we publish on, as well as to our authors.
You can find full details on this project on our website here: http://www.packtpub.com/open-source
Also, whilst we may provide copies of books for reviewing, we never create or fake any reviews, views are the reviewers own.
We would like to apologize for any confusion or concern any of this may have caused.