To License-Discuss (and others interested persons on BCC): Version 2.0 of the Academic Free License (AFL) is hereby submitted for your review and for the approval of the OSI Board of Directors. It can be found at http://rosenlaw.com/afl2.0.html.
Most academic-style licenses follow the BSD model -- short, generous and uncomplicated. [See http://opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php] Simply put, academic licenses permit derivative works to become a part of other software, including proprietary software, for any purpose whatsoever. Unfortunately, those licenses often omit many details, leaving to the imagination how certain things are to work in an open source/proprietary world. The AFL fills in those gaps. It addresses issues of patent, trademark, warranty, jurisdiction and venue, contributor recognition, etc., in ways entirely consistent with the "BSD" philosophy of open source. AFL-licensed software can be used in combination with any other software, open source *or* proprietary, for any purpose whatsoever, including to create derivative works. This new version of the AFL also helps eliminate possible confusion between academic-style licenses and reciprocal licenses [see, for example, the GPL, www.fsf.org/licenses/gpl.html, and the Open Software License (OSL), www.rosenlaw.com/osl2.0.html]. Reciprocity requires that any Derivative Works be licensed under the same license as the Original Work. Reciprocal and non-reciprocal open source licenses ought to be the same -- except with respect to provisions dealing with reciprocity. Therefore, the new AFL is identical to the OSL except that the AFL does not contain a reciprocity provision. A redlined comparison of AFL2.0 and OSL2.0 is at http://rosenlaw.com/afl2.0-redline.pdf. When you suggest changes to the AFL, please consider how that language would read in the OSL, and vice versa. Suggestions regarding both AFL2.0 and OSL2.0 will be welcomed. Feel free to ask questions or complain here on license-discuss. The OSI board of directors needs your input before they decide whether to approve these licenses. In the meantime, I encourage you to think about using the Academic Free License version 2.0 instead of the BSD, MIT and Apache licenses, and their variants, that have proliferated on OSI's approved license list. /Lawrence Rosen Rosenlaw & Einschlag, a technology law firm General counsel, Open Source Initiative 3001 King Ranch Road, Ukiah, CA 95482 707-485-1242 * fax: 707-485-1243 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.rosenlaw.com -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3