Academic Free License Version 3.0

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. This entry covers version 3.0. The license grants rights similar to the BSD, MIT, UoI/NCSA and Apache licenses, which allow software to be made proprietary, but it was written to correct perceived problems with them: it states what software is being licensed, includes a complete copyright grant and a complete patent grant, makes clear that no trademark rights are granted, and warrants that the licensor owns the copyright or distributes the software under a license. The Free Software Foundation considers AFL versions up to and including 3.0 incompatible with the GNU GPL, though Eric S. Raymond contends that version 3.0 is compatible. In mid-2006 the OSI License Proliferation Committee found it redundant with more popular licenses, specifically version 2 of the Apache Software License.