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GitHub hosts millions of open source projects. Become a member of an open source community by participating in some!
Further reading
- UPDATE – Renaming the default branch from
mastertomain - DIY Guides with Open Sourcerer
GitHub built a great site for helping you choose the best license for your project. Based on what you care about with your project, the Choose a License site will help you pick a license that suits your project well. Not having a license is itself a license. It means you as the author retain full rights to the code. If you mean to share that code, be sure to pick an appropriate license.
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Now that you're comfortable with
GitHub let's start giving back to
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the open source community.
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GitHub hosts millions of
open source projects.
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What is open source software?
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Open source software is
software that is modifiable and
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enhanceable by anyone because
the software's license allows it.
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This code is publicly
viewable on GitHub and
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doesn't require private
access to view the code.
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You've probably already used
some open source software.
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Actually, I can almost guarantee you have.
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Git, the version control system we've
been using as a part of this course
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is open source.
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If you've written software using Ruby,
PHP, or
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Python you've also used
open source software.
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These software projects publicly
share their code with the world and
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rely on their communities.
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People who use the software to
contribute back to the project.
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You also created a few open source
projects at the beginning of this course.
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When we created those public repositories
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we were sharing that simple
code with the world.
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An important part of open source
though is adding a license.
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A license is a text file that
tells the world how they can
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use the code we've written.
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Lets go back to our first project now and
add a license.
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Click on the repository you created
in stage two named Treehouse.
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My repository is a little empty because
I'm trying to show you something new.
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Your repository will have the Python
project you added with Allison.
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Now, let's click the new file
button halfway down the page.
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This will allow us to create a new file.
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We'll call this file license.
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License is the standard name for
the file that holds your projects license.
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By using the license name here GitHub can
help us by providing prefilled license
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templates.
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On the right side you should now see
the ability to choose a license.
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This will show a variety of licenses
that GitHub can provide out of the box.
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Of course you can always use your own
by just adding it to the repository.
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For this project let's choose
the MIT license in the drop down.
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There it is.
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GitHub prefilled the files
contents with the MIT license.
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Now all we need to do
is commit the license.
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We'll scroll down to the bottom of
the page, and we'll just use the prefilled
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message that GitHub already added,
and commit this to the master branch.
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Let's just click commit new file.
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That's it.
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Here's our new license.
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Now anyone who comes
across your open source
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project will know that they can use it,
modify it, and redistribute it.
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Not every license is so permissive though.
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You could read more about different
types of licenses in the teacher notes.
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There are a ton of open source
projects that can use the help
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of a Treehouse student like you.
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In our next video we'll show you how
to find a great open source project
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that you can contribute to.
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