Rahul Sharma (Editor)

Academic Free License

Updated on
Edit
Like
Comment
Share on FacebookTweet on TwitterShare on LinkedInShare on Reddit
Author
  
Lawrence E. Rosen

Publisher
  
Lawrence E. Rosen

DFSG compatible
  
?

Latest version
  
1.2, 2.1, 3.0

Published
  
2002

FSF approved
  
Yes

The Academic Free License (AFL) is a permissive free software license written in 2002 by Lawrence E. Rosen, a former general counsel of the Open Source Initiative (OSI).

The license grants similar rights to the BSD, MIT, UoI/NCSA and Apache licenses – licenses allowing the software to be made proprietary – but was written to correct perceived problems with those licenses:

  • The AFL makes clear what software is being licensed by including a statement following the software's copyright notice;
  • The AFL includes a complete copyright grant to the software;
  • The AFL contains a complete patent grant to the software;
  • The AFL makes clear that no trademark rights are granted to the licensor's trademarks;
  • The AFL warrants that the licensor either owns the copyright or is distributing the software under a license;
  • The AFL is itself copyrighted, with the right granted to copy and distribute without modification.

    • The Free Software Foundation consider all AFL versions through 3.0 as incompatible with the GNU GPL. though Eric S. Raymond (a co-founder of the OSI) contends that AFL 3.0 is GPL compatible. In late 2002, an OSI working draft considered it a "best practice" license. In mid-2006, however, the OSI's License Proliferation Committee found it "redundant with more popular licenses", specifically version 2 of the Apache Software License.

    References

    Academic Free License Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA