Home > Academic Free License

The license grants similar rights to the BSD, MIT, UoI/NCSA and Apache licenses — licenses allowing the software to be taken proprietary — but was written to clarify perceived problems with those licenses:

• The AFL makes clear what software is being licensed by including a statement following the software's copyright notice;
• The AFL includes a complete copyright grant to the software;
• The AFL contains a complete patent grant to the software;
• The AFL makes clear that no trademark rights are granted to the licensor's trademarks;
• The AFL warrants that the licensor either owns the copyright or is distributing the software under a license;
• The AFL is itself copyrighted, with the right granted to copy and distribute without modification.

The AFL is not popular. In January 2004, only 16 projects on Freshmeat used a version of the license. According to the Free Software Foundation, the AFL is not compatible with the

External links

• Text of the Academic Free License
• Allocation of the Risk by Lawrence Rosen ( PDF) - reasoning behind the Academic Free License