About Me

PBX I'm Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using open source software, especially Django. I teach photographers web design and professional skills. In the '90s I did graphic design for newspapers and magazines. Then I wrote technology commentary and reviews for Wired, Salon.com, Chicago Tribune, and lots of little places you've never heard of. Feel free to email me.

Book

I'm co-author of "Python Web Development with Django", an excellent guide to my favorite web framework. Its strong points include an introduction to Python, and better coverage of Django 1.0 than nearly anybody else. Published by Addison-Wesley, it is available from Amazon and your favorite technical bookstore as well.

Colophon

Built using Django, served by Apache and mod_wsgi. 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. The markup engine is Markdown.

Pile o'Tags

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

Spam Report

At least 67532 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

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
open source + oscon + php