Since the end of 2008, there has been a hot debate on the relative freedom of the afio software. Everything started by the fact I wanted to incorporate MondoRescue into Fedora. In order to achieve that, I was in need of 2 other additional packages, among which was afio.
Afio was created back in 1985, way before our notion of Open Source existed, even before the first GPL was written (dating from 1989). At that time, it was frequent to publish a piece of code people wanted to share on Usenet, in the comp.sources.unix. And it was also frequent to publish it with a note saying that people were allowed to share as long as no profit was made with it (same idea in fac t as the GPL to not render a software proprietary aferits distribution).