Generate license files with year and name

Pick a license, fill in a name.

Generate a license file from a curated set of open-source licenses. Pure browser; no login.

LicenseYearCopyright holder

LICENSE

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2026 Your Name

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.

Choosing an open-source license

Code without a license is not open source. By default, copyright law gives the author all rights, so others may look at public code but not legally copy, change or share it. A LICENSE file in the root of a repository grants those rights on clear terms, and platforms such as GitHub and GitLab detect it and show it on the project page.

This generator writes a complete LICENSE file for eight common licenses, using the same official texts GitHub uses. For licenses with a copyright line, it fills in the year and the copyright holder.

How to use it

Choose a license.
Enter the year and the copyright holder: your name, your organisation, or The Project Authors.
Read the full text in the preview.
Download it as LICENSE, or copy it into a file of that name in the root of your project.

Example: the MIT License

Input

MIT, 2026, Ada Lovelace

Output

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2026 Ada Lovelace

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
…

The MIT text is short: anyone may use the code for anything, as long as the copyright notice and license stay with it.

Permissive or copyleft

Permissive licenses, MIT, BSD, ISC and Apache-2.0, let others use your code in any project, including closed-source products, as long as they keep the notice. Apache-2.0 adds an explicit patent grant and is popular with companies for that reason. The Unlicense goes further and places the work in the public domain where the law allows.

Copyleft licenses require that changes are shared under the same terms. GPL-3.0 applies that to any program that includes your code, while MPL-2.0 is a weaker copyleft that covers only the files you wrote, so they can be combined with code under other licenses.

Where the copyright line goes

MIT, BSD and ISC start with a copyright line, which the generator fills in. Apache-2.0, MPL-2.0 and GPL-3.0 do not: the license file is the unmodified license text, and your copyright notice goes in a NOTICE file or at the top of each source file. Each of those texts ends with an appendix that shows the recommended source-file header.

This is not legal advice

A license is a legal document. For a personal project, picking a standard license and not changing its text is usually all you need. For company code, code with contributors who have not agreed to terms, or code that bundles third-party work under other licenses, check with someone who knows the licences involved.

Questions

Which license should I choose?

If you want maximum adoption and little friction, MIT or Apache-2.0. If you want improvements to stay open, GPL-3.0, or MPL-2.0 for a file-level middle ground.

Can I change a license later?

You can license new versions differently, but copies already released under the old license keep it. With outside contributors, you usually need their agreement.

Is the text downloaded from somewhere?

No. The official texts are bundled with the page, so nothing is fetched when you generate a file.