Academic Free License

Template:Infobox software license The Academic Free License (AFL) is a permissive free software license written in 2002 by Lawrence E. Rosen, 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.

AFL versions 1.2 and 2.1 are not compatible with the GNU GPL. The Free Software Foundation has not commented on the newer version 3.0, which Eric S. Raymond contends 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.

External links

• Text of the Academic Free License v1.2
• Text of the Academic Free License v2.1
• Text of the Academic Free License v3.0
• Allocation of the Risk by Lawrence Rosen (PDF) - reasoning behind the Academic Free License

See also

• License proliferation
• Open Software License - similar, but reciprocal license by the same author

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