# github/choosealicense.com

A site to provide non-judgmental guidance on choosing a license for your open source project

Repository: https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/choosealicensecom
Homepage: https://choosealicense.com
Language: HTML
License: MIT
License Family: permissive
Topics: jekyll, open-source, licensing, law, open-source-licensing
Last push: 2026-07-13T04:34:41+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 74/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-02T17:46:02.011165+00:00)
- activity 92, release rhythm 35, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 4797, "days_push": 51, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: no_releases
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 4203, forks 1623 (observed 2026-08-28T04:08:39.000039+00:00)

## What it is
ChooseALicense.com is an open-source website and Jekyll-based catalog that provides clear, non-judgmental guidance on choosing an open source license. It catalogs popular licenses with plain-language summaries of permissions, conditions, and limitations, and its data is vendored into GitHub's license detection tooling.

## Use cases
- choose a license for my open source project
- compare MIT vs GPL vs Apache licenses
- understand what a license permits and requires
- find a license for a non-software project
- get license metadata and legal text for tooling
- learn what happens if I don't license my code

## When to choose
- you're starting a new open source project and unsure which license to pick
- you need plain-language explanations of common licenses
- you want a curated catalog of license texts and metadata for tooling

## When to avoid
- you need legal advice from a lawyer
- you need a comprehensive directory of every license ever written
- you need automated license detection in your own tool (use Licensee instead)

## Facets
- artifact type: learning-resource
- maturity: active
- function: documentation, developer-tools
- domain: developer-tools, legal, documentation
- platform: self-hosted
- tags: open-source-licensing, jekyll, license-catalog, license-chooser, legal-guidance, open-source, web-server

## Member repositories
- github/choosealicense.com (main) score 74

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:08:39.000039+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-29T18:22:32.089869+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com (fetched 2026-08-28T04:08:39.000039+00:00, sha ca071edb64fa)
  - homepage: https://choosealicense.com (fetched 2026-08-29T09:12:48.838679+00:00, sha 7210c386e9e5)
  - site_page: https://choosealicense.com/about (fetched 2026-08-29T09:12:48.844574+00:00, sha eddef7e24d7f)
  - site_page: https://choosealicense.com/licenses/gpl-3.0 (fetched 2026-08-29T09:12:48.841370+00:00, sha 1ce81ae4a166)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.