choosealicense.com/README.md

# Choose a License Web Site [![Build Status](https://travis-ci.org/github/choosealicense.com.png?branch=gh-pages)](https://travis-ci.org/github/choosealicense.com)

Like a Choose Your Own Adventure site, but only much less interesting.

# Intro

A lot of repositories on GitHub.com don't have a license. GitHub provides
a license chooser, but if you don't know anything about licenses, how are you
supposed to make an informed decision?

[ChooseALicense.com](http://www.choosealicense.com "Choose A Licence website") is designed to help people make an informed decision about
licenses.

# Immediate Goals

* Non-partisan. Our goal is to help you find a license that meets *your* goals.
* Well designed, but that goes without saying.
* The homepage should have just enough to help 99% of folks make a decision.
* For the 1%, the site will contain a list of licenses common to specific
communities and situations.
* Not comprehensive. Seems like an odd goal, but there are a bajillion
licenses out there. We're going to have to filter that down to a
small list of those that matter.

# Run It On Your Machine

```bash
git clone https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com.git
cd choosealicense.com
script/bootstrap
script/server
```
Open `http://localhost:4000` in your favorite browser.

# Adding a license

The text of the license should be wrapped to a 78 character width.

Licenses sit in the `/licenses` folder. Each license has YAML front matter
describing the license's properties. The body of the file should be the text
of the license in plain text. The available metadata fields are:

* `title` - The name of the license
* `layout` - This should be `license`
* `permalink` - The absolute URL to the license, beginning with `/licenses/`
* `source` - URL to the license source text
* `note` - The note field in the sidebar (optional)
* `how` - How to use the license, also in the sidebar
* `required`, `permitted`, `forbidden` - bulleted list of rules applicable to the license (see below)
* `filename` - The filename to be created on GitHub.com when a repository is initialized with this license.

The licenses on choosealicense.com are regularly imported to GitHub.com to be
used as the list of licenses available when creating a repository. When we
create a repository, we will replace certain strings in the license with
variables from the repository. These can be used to create accurate copyright
notices. The available variables are:

* `[fullname]` - The full name or username of the repository owner
* `[login]` - The repository owner's username
* `[email]` - The repository owner's primary email address
* `[project]` - The repository name
* `[description]` - The description of the repository
* `[year]` - The current year

# Rules

Rules (the license's properties) are stored as a bulleted list within the
licenses YAML front matter. A full list of rules can be found in `_data/rules.yml`.
Each rule has a name e.g., `include-copyright`, a human-readable label, e.g.,
`Copyright inclusion`, and a description `Include the original copyright with the code`.
To add a new rule, simply add it to `_data/rules.yml` and reference it in the
appropriate license.

# License

The content of this project itself is licensed under the
[Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/deed.en_US),
and the underlying source code used to format and display that content
is licensed under the [MIT license](http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php).