Choosing an Open Source License
It’s easy to get caught up in code. Sharing your code isn’t everything, though: it’s also important to tell people how they can use that code. Choosing an open source…
It’s easy to get caught up in code. Sharing your code isn’t everything, though: it’s also important to tell people how they can use that code.
Choosing an open source license can be confusing. We’ve created ChooseALicense.com to help you make that decision.

You can see a breakdown of what’s required, what’s permitted, and what’s forbidden for each license:

When you’ve made your choice, copy it to your clipboard with one click:

Have any suggestions? ChooseALicense.com itself is open source. Send us a Pull Request with your changes.
Licenses on GitHub.com
Now that we have all these licenses in one happy home, we want to help people choose their licenses on GitHub, too. When you create a new repository you’ll see a new license picker:

To get started, simply point your browser at choosealicense.com, or for more information, you can dive into the full documentation. Happy licensing!
Written by
Related posts
Don’t stop early: Case-folding source code at memory speed
How a branch-free loop and byte-space arithmetic let GitHub case-fold every byte of code search at >45 GiB/s on a single core.
$100 million for open source: A milestone built by the community
Celebrating $100 million contributed by the community to the people who build and sustain open source every day.
6 security settings every GitHub maintainer should enable this week
These six free settings will not make your project unhackable. Nothing will. What they will do is close the easy doors. Turn these on, and your project will be meaningfully harder to attack than it was before.