Open Source License Generator

What this tool does

Open Source License Generator produces the full standard text of a chosen open-source license, MIT, Apache License 2.0 (short notice), BSD 3-Clause, GNU GPL v3.0 (short notice), ISC, or the public-domain Unlicense, with the author/copyright holder name and year automatically filled in, ready to save as a LICENSE file.

Publishing code without a license file leaves its legal status genuinely ambiguous, by default, "all rights reserved" copyright applies even to code sitting in a public repository, so anyone wanting to actually use, modify or redistribute it has no clear permission to do so without an explicit license.

This generator produces the complete standard text for six commonly chosen licenses, MIT, Apache License 2.0 (as its standard short notice), BSD 3-Clause, GNU GPL v3.0 (as its standard short notice), ISC, and the publicdomain-dedicating Unlicense, automatically substituting your name and the year so the result is ready to save directly as a LICENSE file.

How to use Open Source License Generator

1. Choose the License you want to use.
2. Enter the Author / copyright holder name.
3. Enter the Year (defaults to the current year).
4. Download the generated text and save it as a LICENSE file at your project root.

Tips for better results

• MIT and ISC are the simplest and most permissive of the options here, requiring only that the license and copyright notice be preserved; they’re a common default for small open-source projects.
• Apache License 2.0 and GPL v3.0 are generated here as their standard short notices, which reference the full license text by URL; for complete legal certainty, also include the full license text (linked in the generated output) alongside the short notice, as those licenses’ own official guidance recommends.
• The Unlicense dedicates code to the public domain with no conditions at all, not even attribution; choose it deliberately, since it waives more rights than the permissive licenses above it.
• Whichever license you choose, save the output exactly as a file named LICENSE (no extension) at your repository’s root, which is the convention GitHub and most tooling expect.

Common use cases

• Adding a proper LICENSE file to a new open-source project before its first public release.
• Generating license text with the correct year and author name for a project being open-sourced.
• Comparing the actual text of different common licenses before deciding which one fits a project.
• Quickly producing a license file for a personal or internal tool being shared publicly for the first time.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Publishing code with no license file at all and assuming it is automatically open for anyone to use; without an explicit license, default copyright law leaves usage rights genuinely unclear.
• Treating the Apache-2.0 or GPL-3.0 short notices generated here as the complete legal license text; both licenses’ own guidance recommends including the full license text as well, not just the short notice.
• Choosing a license, like strong copyleft GPL, without understanding its implications for how others can use and redistribute derived work; read what each license actually requires before committing to one.