The Academic Free License (AFL) is a
permissive free software license written in 2002 by
Lawrence E. Rosen, a former
general counsel
A general counsel, also known as chief counsel or chief legal officer (CLO), is the chief in-house lawyer for a company or a governmental department.
In a company, the person holding the position typically reports directly to the CEO, and their ...
of the
Open Source Initiative
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is the steward of the Open Source Definition, the set of rules that define open source software. It is a California public-benefit nonprofit corporation,_with_501(c)(3).html" ;"title="110. - 6910./ref> is a type o ...
(OSI).
The license grants similar rights to the
BSD,
MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
,
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;
*includes a complete copyright grant to the software;
*contains a complete patent grant to the software;
*makes clear that no trademark rights are granted to the licensor's trademarks;
*warrants that the licensor either owns the copyright or is distributing the software under a license;
*is itself copyrighted, with the right granted to copy and distribute without modification.
The
Free Software Foundation
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed under copyleft (" ...
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
License proliferation is the phenomenon of an abundance of already existing and the continued creation of new software licenses for software and software packages in the FOSS ecosystem. License proliferation affects the whole FOSS ecosystem neg ...
Committee found it "redundant with more popular licenses",
specifically version 2 of the
Apache Software License.
See also
*
License proliferation
License proliferation is the phenomenon of an abundance of already existing and the continued creation of new software licenses for software and software packages in the FOSS ecosystem. License proliferation affects the whole FOSS ecosystem neg ...
*
Open Software License
The Open Software License (OSL) is a software license created by Lawrence Rosen. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has certified it as an open-source license, but the Debian project judged version 1.1 to be incompatible with the DFSG. The OSL is ...
– similar, but reciprocal license by the same author
*
Software using the Academic Free License (category)
References
External links
Text of the Academic Free License v3.0Allocation of the Risk by Lawrence Rosen
( PDF) – reasoning behind the Academic Free License
{{FOSS
Free and open-source software licenses
Permissive software licenses