Academic Free License

The Academic Free License (AFL ) is a permissive open source license that was written in 2002 by Lawrence E. Rosen, the main advocate of the Open Source Initiative ( OSI), and is currently present in version 3.0. Previous versions were 1.2 and 2.1. The AFL is recognized by the OSI and the Free Software Foundation, but not GPL - compatible. The AFL is not one of the more stringent copyleft licenses because of their freedom of movement.

The AFL in relation to other licenses

The AFL acknowledges rights similar to the BSD license, the MIT license, the University of Illinois / NCSA Open Source License or the Apache license, allowing it to publish software proprietary. The AFL has therefore been written to fix the following problems with these licenses:

• The AFL makes it clear what software can ever be licensed by a copyright notice.
• The AFL contains a complete copyright permission for the software.
• The AFL admits an unlimited right to use all patents for software.
• The AFL makes it clear that no trademark rights to the author for his product have been issued.
• The AFL guarantees that the licensor is also either author or the software is distributed under a suitable license.
• The AFL is itself copyrighted, however, to copy with the right for everyone the same without change and distribute.

Compatibility and recognition

The versions 1.2 and 2.1 of the AFL are not compatible with the GPL, the FSF also does not take into consideration, 3.0 recognize the AFL as compatible with the GPL, however, claimed Eric S. Raymond, a co-founder of OSI that the AFL is GPL - compatible. 2002 marked an OSI working draft the AFL as a sample solution. In 2006, the License Proliferation Committee of OSI was the AFL as redundant with more popular licenses., Especially version 2 of the Apache license.