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GitHub hosts millions of open source projects. Become a member of an open source community by participating in some!
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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[MUSIC]
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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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