Unclear wording on the AFL disclaimer

Evan Prodromou evan at bad.dynu.ca
Sun Aug 14 13:52:24 UTC 2005


I actually have no clue who handles the Web design on opensource.org,
but I thought I might post a suggestion here.

I recently saw the following disclaimer on the AFL 2.1 page:

        Larry Rosen has ceased to use or recommend any version of the
        Academic Free License below version 2.1

        http://www.opensource.org/licenses/afl-2.1.php

My read of this was:

        Larry Rosen does not recommend any version of the AFL, including
        the 2.1 version shown on this page after this disclaimer

After a couple of extra reads, I now think it means:

        Larry Rosen does not recommend any version of the AFL which has
        a version number less than 2.1

I suggest changing the wording to to the following:

        The license author, Larry Rosen, discourages the use of versions
        1.1, 1.2, and 2.0 of the Academic Free License, and recommends
        that copyright holders upgrade to version 2.1 immediately.

Strangely, the disclaimer _doesn't_ appear on either the AFL 2.0 or AFL
1.1 pages! So it should probably go on there, too.

Finally, a link to an explanation for why the earlier license versions
are so flawed that they need this red-letter disclaimer might be useful.

~Evan

-- 
Evan Prodromou
evan at bad.dynu.ca
"By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart
of on the same terms." -- Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"



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