| Academic Free License | |
| Author: | Lawrence E. Rosen |
| Version: | 1.2, 2.1, 3.0 |
| Copyright: | Lawrence E. Rosen |
| Date: | 2002 |
| Spdx: | AFL-3.0 AFL-2.1 AFL-2.0 AFL-1.2 AFL-1.1 |
| Osi Approved: | Yes |
| Debian Approved: | ? |
| Free Software: | Yes |
| Gpl Compatible: | No |
| Copyleft: | No |
| Linking: | 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:
The Free Software Foundation consider all AFL versions up to and including 3.0 as incompatible with the GNU GPL.[1] though Eric S. Raymond (a co-founder of the OSI) contends that AFL 3.0 is GPL compatible.[2] In late 2002, an OSI working draft considered it a "best practice" license.[3] In mid-2006, however, the OSI's License Proliferation Committee found it "redundant with more popular licenses",[4] specifically version 2 of the Apache Software License.