Coobird’s Blog

For the past few weeks, I’ve been releasing a few pieces of software such as Pitacalc, Coobird’s Blocks and now Cannons 2000 under the modified BSD license. More information on the license is available from Wikipedia and the Open Source Initiative.

First of all, I chose to have my software released under an open source license because I want my code to be available for others to use if desired and also to waive the liability from any damage which could occur. With the choice to open source the software, there are many open source licenses to choose from. Of all licenses, the most famous is probably the GNU General Public License, or the GPL.

The GPL tries to keep the software free. However, this is puts restrictions to how the software and its source can be used. For example, if I release my software under GPL, people who want to incorporate my code into their software can do so without restrictions. However, if the person wants to release the software that uses my code, they must also distribute their code under the GPL. To me, this is a restriction that I am not particularly enthusiastic about. This leads to some debate whether or not the GPL can be considered viral.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with GPL. In fact, I use many GPL’ed software like OpenOffice.org, the GIMP, VirtualDub, to name a few. However, I would like my code to be used without restriction of having to release the source under GPL. The requirement that GPL’ed code can only be used in a GPL’ed program seems a little bit restrictive, and that requirement seems to promote the proliferation of GPL-licensed software over the freedom of using the software itself. A non-copyleft license like the modified BSD license seems to be less restrictive in the sense that it allows the people that obtain the software to do what they want to do with the software. The “Types of copyleft and relation to other licenses” in the Copyleft article at Wikipedia sums up the issue of freedom:

This debate hinges on complex issues such as the definition of freedom and whose freedoms are more important, or whether to maximize the freedom of all potential future recipients of a work (freedom from the creation of proprietary software). Non-copyleft free software licenses maximize the freedom of the initial recipient (freedom to create proprietary software).

The GPL is concerned about having software free from being locked up in proprietary code, while the BSD license is more concerned about giving freedom to the person who obtains the software to do anything they want to do with it.

Although most the software I’ve released so far use the modified BSD license, it doesn’t preclude me from picking the GPL as the license of choice for a piece of software if I feel it’s better suited than using another license.

One big headache I’ve had for the past year with coobird.net was the font rendering on Internet Explorer 6 (IE6). Compared to other browsers, IE6 will render the fonts at a larger size that is defined by using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). My browser of choice is Firefox, so I generally create content and view them on Firefox. Unfortunately, IE6 implements CSS differently from other browsers, the end result is text that’s too big and borders that are too thick.

The following are some screenshots of coobird.net before changes were made to make the page rendering more consistent between IE6 and other browsers:

Firefox 2

Opera 9

Internet Explorer 6

Searching around for the CSS font rendering of Internet Explorer 6, there are quite a few people out there who are experiencing the same problem. One way to fix this problem is to use a different style sheet for Internet Explorer 6 using conditional comments. (Hack-free CSS for IE was a good article on conditional comments.)

Currently, coobird.net implements the conditional comments technique mentioned above to use a separate style sheet that specifies different font sizes and border thicknesses for IE6. Finally coobird.net looks half-way decent on Internet Explorer 6.