Licensing a repository Public repositories on GitHub are often used to share open source software. For your repository to truly be open source, you'll need to license it so that others are free to use, change, and distribute the software.

In this article Choosing the right license We created choosealicense.com, to help you understand how to license your code. A software license tells others what they can and can't do with your source code, so it's important to make an informed decision.

You're under no obligation to choose a license. However, without a license, the default copyright laws apply, meaning that you retain all rights to your source code and no one may reproduce, distribute, or create derivative works from your work.

via https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/managing-your-reposi...

> Because you retain ownership of and responsibility for Your Content, we need you to grant us — and other GitHub Users — certain legal permissions, listed in Sections D.4 — D.7. These license grants apply to Your Content. If you upload Content that already comes with a license granting GitHub the permissions we need to run our Service, no additional license is required. You understand that you will not receive any payment for any of the rights granted in Sections D.4 — D.7. The licenses you grant to us will end when you remove Your Content from our servers, unless other Users have forked it.

https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...