Consensus about the Academic Free License (AFL) v3.0

2015-06-10 Thread Francesco Poli
Hello debian-legal regulars,
I would need to ask your consensus opinion on the non-freeness of the
Academic Free License (AFL) v3.0.

My personal conclusion is that this license includes non-free
restrictions and is also problematic with respect to Debian mirror
infrastructure.
My own analysis [1][2] of the AFL v3.0 was sent to debian-legal on
September 2012 and received no rebuttal.

[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2012/09/msg00081.html
[2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2012/09/msg00082.html

I then proceeded to file the bug report against subversion, but it was
closed [3] with the request to form consensus on debian-legal (which I
think was already formed, since nobody objected to my analysis...).

[3] https://bugs.debian.org/689919#51


Could you please explicitly express your agreement with my analysis?
Thanks for any help you may provide.


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. Francesco Poli .
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Re: Consensus about the Academic Free License (AFL) v3.0

2015-06-10 Thread Charles Plessy
Le Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 11:48:19PM +0200, Francesco Poli a écrit :
 Hello debian-legal regulars,
 I would need to ask your consensus opinion on the non-freeness of the
 Academic Free License (AFL) v3.0.

Hi Francesco,

I think that there is a broad consensus to accept the AFL as Free license,
in Debian, the OSI, Fedora, the FSF, etc.

Its wording is often poorly chosen, but I think that the consensus is to
conclude in favor of the Free interpretation.

Here are a few comments about the license.

 - point 3) is poorly worded, but assuming it is well-intented, it is Free.

 - regarding points 5) and 9), the FSF notes that the AFL has clause similar to 
one of
   the Open Software License that requires distributors to try to obtain 
explicit
   assent to the license 
(http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#OSLRant).
   This is easy to infringe, but this is not forbidden by the DFSG (which is why
   we tolerate advertisement clauses, which are also easy to infringe).

 - The Attribution Notice sounds a bit like an invariant section, but it is 
also
   very similar to the NOTICE file from the Apache License, which is Free.

Altogether, I think that #689919 should stay closed, although it would be great
of course if the Subversion authors would manage to elimiate this license from
their sources, because this license is not a good example to follow.

Have a nice day,

Charles

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan


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