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 (OSI).

The AFL: The Free Software Foundation consider all AFL versions up to and including 3.0 as incompatible with the GNU GPL.

[1] though Eric S. Raymond (a co-founder of the OSI) contends that AFL 3.0 is GPL compatible.

[3] In late 2002, an OSI working draft considered it a "best practice" license.

[4] In mid-2006, however, the OSI's License Proliferation Committee found it "redundant with more popular licenses",[2] specifically version 2 of the Apache Software License.