Open source license generator
Get the full text of MIT, Apache 2.0, GPL, BSD, MPL and six other licenses, with your name and year filled in.
Result
The result will appear here.Every open-source repository needs a LICENSE file, and the text has to be the exact, unmodified license — a paraphrase is not the license. This tool gives you the texts published by choosealicense.com, the same files GitHub adds when you pick a license while creating a repository, and fills in the copyright year and holder where the license has a place for them. Next to the text it lists what the license permits, what it requires of people who reuse your code and what it disclaims, taken from the same site.
How it works
- Eleven licenses are included: MIT, Apache-2.0, GPL-3.0, AGPL-3.0, LGPL-3.0, BSD-2-Clause, BSD-3-Clause, MPL-2.0, ISC, the Unlicense and CC0-1.0.
- The year defaults to the current one; a span such as 2019-2026 is accepted too. Leave the holder empty and [fullname] stays in the text for you to fill in.
- MIT, BSD and ISC have a copyright line and get your details. Apache, the GPL family, MPL, the Unlicense and CC0 have none, so their text comes back unchanged.
- Permissions, conditions and limitations are shown as ✓, ! and ✗, as choosealicense.com summarises them. The texts are a dated snapshot of that site, and the snapshot's commit is shown.
Where your data goes
Nowhere. This tool runs entirely in your browser: the text you paste is processed by the page and is never transmitted to a server or written to a log.
This tool is free and needs no account. Its results exist only in your open page and are not saved anywhere.
What it costs
This tool is free, with no sign-in and no points.
Common questions
- Which license should I choose?
- If you want the fewest strings attached, MIT is the most common choice. Apache-2.0 is similar but also grants a patent licence and requires changed files to say so. If you want improvements to stay open, GPL-3.0 requires anyone who distributes a modified version to publish its source, and AGPL-3.0 extends that to software offered over a network. MPL-2.0 sits in between: only the files you licensed must stay open.
- Where do I put my name for Apache 2.0 or the GPL?
- Not in the license text — it has no copyright line. For Apache, put your copyright line in a NOTICE file or in a short header at the top of each source file; the appendix at the end of the license shows that header, with [yyyy] and [name of copyright owner] as its placeholders. The GPL's closing section, How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs, gives the equivalent header.
- Can I edit the license text?
- Do not change the terms. Tools such as GitHub's license detection, npm and package scanners recognise a license by its exact text, and a modified license is legally a new one that people have to read from scratch. Filling in the year and name is expected; rewording clauses is not.
- Is this legal advice?
- No. The texts are the official ones and the summaries come from choosealicense.com, but which license suits a project — and how it interacts with your employer's rules or your dependencies' licenses — is a question for a lawyer when the stakes are real.
The open-source behind it
This tool runs on github/choosealicense.com, released under MIT. If you need the same behaviour inside your own program, that is the library to reach for.
github/choosealicense.comAlso known as
- license generator
- mit license generator
- open source license
- apache 2.0 license text
- choose a license
- gpl 3.0 license text
- license file for github