E-Scribe News : a programmer’s blog

About Me

PBX My name is Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using as much open source software as possible. From September to June I teach web design and other important non-photographic professional skills to photographers. In the '90s I wrote technology commentary and reviews for magazines, newspapers, and web publications, including Wired, Salon.com, FamilyPC, the late lamented Web Review, and the Chicago Tribune. Feel free to email me.

Book Project

I'm co-authoring a book, "Python Web Development with Django", with Jeff Forcier and Wesley Chun. It will be published by Prentice Hall in July 2008, but is available for pre-ordering on Amazon now.

Colophon

This site is built on a fresh trunk checkout of Django, running on Python 2.5.1, served by Apache and mod_python. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive.

Pile o'Tags

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Stuff I Use

Akismet, del.icio.us, Django, dpaste.com, Emacs, FreeBSD, Freenode, jQuery, LaunchBar, MacPorts, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, SQLite, Subversion, TextMate, Trac, Ubuntu Linux, wmii

A Django site.
(Finally!)

Copyright 2008
by Paul Bissex
and E-Scribe New Media

Open Source Initiative at OSCON

According to their blog, the Open Source Intiative (OSI) is holding a public meeting at OSCON on Thursday July 3 at 7:30pm. I've been wondering what has transpired since they issued their statement on license proliferation back in April:

Interference between different open-source licenses is now perceived as a sufficiently serious problem that OSI has become as a victim of its own earlier success... The day of the open-source license as tribal flag or corporate monument will have to come to a close.

I thought those were hopeful words when I read them, but it's been pretty quiet since then. No doubt there's a relation -- whether cause or effect I don't know -- to recent structural and leadership changes.

There are a lot of real issues with license conflicts (q.v. the MySQL and PHP5 situation), but there's a lot of FUD too, and the crazy number of different licenses facilitates it. It would be nice to see someone take the lead in cleaning things up a bit.

Thursday, July 28th, 2005
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Some related posts: Toolbot.com source code available on request • Simon Willison's EuroOSCON report • More OSCON talks • OSCON audio: Linux in Search of the Desktop • Mozilla goes corporate • OSCON 2005

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