What is choosealicense.com?

This repository powers choosealicense.com, a website that helps people pick an open source license for their software projects. The site aims to give clear, straightforward guidance without pushing any particular license, so that developers, founders, and contributors can understand what each license actually means before committing to one. The project is a static website built with Jekyll, a tool that converts structured text files into HTML pages. Each license in the catalog is stored as a plain text file with metadata describing what the license permits (such as commercial use or modification), what conditions it places on users (such as sharing source code), and what it does not cover (such as patent rights or warranties). These structured descriptions are what power both the website and GitHub's own license detection features. The catalog is intentionally limited to the most commonly used and meaningful licenses, rather than trying to list every license that exists. Each license entry on the site includes a plain-English description of what it allows and requires, with real-world example projects that use it. GitHub uses the data in this repository to power several features on the platform: the license chooser when creating a new repository, the license detection displayed on repository pages, and the licenses API. Developers who want to run the site locally can clone the repository and start it with a few shell commands. The project also has a contributing guide for anyone who wants to propose adding a new license to the catalog.