Author | Lawrence E. Rosen |
---|---|
Latest version | 1.2, 2.1, 3.0 |
Publisher | Lawrence E. Rosen |
Published | 2002 |
DFSG compatible | ? |
FSF approved | Yes |
OSI approved | Yes |
GPL compatible | No |
Copyleft | No |
Linking from code with a different license | 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 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.