Open Source License Generator

About Open Source License Generator

An open source license is a legal document that tells anyone who finds your code exactly what they're allowed to do with it — use it, modify it, redistribute it, sell products built on it — and under what conditions. Publishing code without any license attached is a common and important mistake to avoid: under default copyright law in most countries, code with no explicit license is technically "all rights reserved," meaning others have no clear legal permission to use it at all, regardless of your intent in making the repository public.

This tool generates the full, correct text for four of the most widely used permissive open source licenses, each filled in automatically with your name and the current year: MIT (by far the most popular license on GitHub — extremely short, extremely permissive, requiring only that the license and copyright notice be preserved), ISC (functionally almost identical to MIT with slightly simpler wording, used by Node.js core and many npm packages), and BSD 2-Clause and 3-Clause (similar permissive terms to MIT, with the 3-Clause variant adding a restriction against using the project's name to endorse derived products without permission).

All four licenses generated here share a common philosophy: permissive licensing, meaning they impose minimal restrictions on what others can do with your code, in contrast to copyleft licenses (like the GPL family) which require derivative works to also be open-sourced under the same terms. This tool intentionally doesn't attempt to generate GPL, LGPL, or Apache 2.0 license text — those licenses are considerably longer with more legally significant clauses, and getting even small wording details wrong in a legal document carries more risk than it's worth; for those licenses, copy the exact, official text directly from the Free Software Foundation or Apache Software Foundation.

Once generated, save the output as a file named exactly `LICENSE` (no file extension) in your repository's root directory — this is the convention GitHub, GitLab, and virtually every package registry look for to automatically detect and display your project's license.

How it works

1. Pick a license. Choose MIT, ISC, BSD 2-Clause, or BSD 3-Clause.
2. Enter your name and year. Fill in the copyright holder's name and the current year.
3. Copy the full license text. Save the result as a LICENSE file in your project's root directory.