Academic Free License

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The Academic Free License is an open source / free software license written in 2002 by Lawrence E. Rosen, general counsel of the Open Source Initiative.

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 a popular license. In January 2006, only 42 [1] projects on Freshmeat used a version of the license. According to the Free Software Foundation, the AFL version 1.2 is not compatible with the GNU GPL; however, the FSF has not commented on the newer version 2.1. Eric S. Raymond, among others, contends the AFL is compatible with the GPL. Template:Citation needed

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