{"id":"AAL","title":"Attribution Assurance License","reviewed_on":"2026-09-15","reviewer":"Giray Havur","text_source":"https://raw.githubusercontent.com/spdx/license-list-data/main/text/AAL.txt","text_retrieved":true,"verdict":"corrected","summary":"The Attribution Assurance License is a BSD-style permissive license with an unusually heavy attribution condition: the signed text must be displayed in source redistributions and the author's name, professional identification and URL must be shown each time the program is launched. The record has the right permissions and the right trademark prohibition; the share-alike prohibition and the added-statement prohibition have no basis in the text.","findings":[{"rubric":5,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:prohibition","description":"cc:ShareAlike is prohibited. The text has four numbered conditions and none of them concerns the terms a redistributor may choose; it is adapted from the BSD license, which is silent on reciprocity. A silent license must carry no share-alike statement rather than a prohibition, because the prohibition changes the compatibility outcome.","action":"proposed","change":"# remove\nodrl:prohibition [ a odrl:Prohibition ;\n        odrl:action cc:ShareAlike ] ;\n"},{"rubric":4,"severity":"minor","field":"odrl:prohibition","description":"dalicc:addStatement is prohibited without support: nothing in the four conditions stops a redistributor from adding its own notices.","action":"proposed","change":"# remove\nodrl:prohibition [ a odrl:Prohibition ;\n        odrl:action dalicc:addStatement ] ;\n"},{"rubric":4,"severity":"info","field":"odrl:prohibition","description":"dalicc:promote is prohibited and condition 3 supports it: \"Neither the name nor any trademark of the Author may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.\"","action":"none"},{"rubric":5,"severity":"minor","field":"odrl:duty","description":"The attribution and notice duties sit on cc:DerivativeWorks and odrl:distribute, while odrl:modify and odrl:derive are bare. Condition 1 applies to redistributions \"in whole or part and with or without modification\", so the duties belong on modify and derive too.","action":"proposed","change":"# add to the odrl:modify and odrl:derive permissions\nodrl:duty [ a odrl:Duty ;\n        odrl:action cc:Attribution ],\n    [ a odrl:Duty ;\n        odrl:action cc:Notice ] ;\n"},{"rubric":8,"severity":"gap","field":"vocabulary","description":"Condition 2 requires a runtime attribution display: \"each time the resulting executable program or a program dependent thereon is launched, a prominent display (e.g., splash screen or banner text) of the Author's attribution information\". cc:Attribution cannot say where or when. Proposed term: dalicc:runtimeAttributionDisplay. Condition 1 also requires the text to be GPG-signed and verifiable, which has no term either.","action":"none"},{"rubric":10,"severity":"minor","field":"record","description":"Standard-license addition of 2026-09-15, decision 9 and 10: the record was corrected against its new siblings and versioned. Library convention 10: the disclaimer paragraph held both the warranty sentence and the liability sentence, which begins 'IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR OR ANY CONTRIBUTOR BE LIABLE'. It is split, as the 116 records of the standard-license addition split it.","action":"applied"}],"family":"Other OSI approved licenses (corporate, academic, weak copyleft)","port_of":null,"variant_kind":null,"notes":"Nothing applied. This record uses the composer template shared by AAL, AFL-3.0, APL-1.0, APSL-2.0, CATOSL-1.1, CECILL-2.1, EPL-1.0 and PHP-3.0: bare odrl:derive and odrl:modify permissions with the real duties hung on cc:DerivativeWorks, plus a fixed block of three prohibitions (cc:ShareAlike, dalicc:addStatement, dalicc:promote). The template fits a permissive license and misdescribes every reciprocal one."}