Staff Software Engineer, GitHub
Now you can look for repositories by their license. Search for a specific license using a query such as license:mit or license:gpl-3.0 or find repositories licensed under a particular license…
Now you can look for repositories by their license. Search for a specific license using a query such as license:mit or license:gpl-3.0 or find repositories licensed under a particular license family—Creative Commons, for example—with a query such as license:cc. We’ve added a new license filter on the Advanced Search page to help you craft the right query.
With this update, you’ll also see repository licenses in even more places around GitHub: organization and user profiles, the new Discover Repositories tab, and in search results.
We hope having license information more readily available will help you find projects you’d like to contribute to, as well as useful projects that fit your licensing requirements. To learn more, check out the documentation on searching repositories by license.
Written by
Related posts
This year’s most influential open source projects
From Appwrite to Zulip, Universe 2025’s Open Source Zone was stacked with standout projects showing just how far open source can go. Meet the maintainers—and if you want to join them in 2026, you can now apply for next year’s cohort.