Lice generates license files. No more hunting down licenses from other projects.

About what you'd expect:

easy_install lice

or:

pip install lice

Generate a BSD-3 license, the default:

$ lice
Copyright (c) 2013, Jeremy Carbaugh

All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification,
...

Generate an MIT license:

$ lice mit
The MIT License (MIT)
Copyright (c) 2013 Jeremy Carbaugh

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
...

Generate a BSD-3 license, specifying the year and organization to be used:

$ lice -y 2012 -o "Sunlight Foundation"
Copyright (c) 2012, Sunlight Foundation

All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification,
...

If organization is not specified, lice will first attempt to use git config to find your name. If not found, it will use the value of the $USER environment variable. If the project name is not specified, the name of the current directory is used. Year will default to the current year.

You can see what variables are available to you for any of the licenses:

$ lice --vars mit
The mit license template contains the following variables:
  year
  organization

Great! Is it a license that is commonly used? If so, open an issue or, if you are feeling generous, fork and submit a pull request.

usage: lice [-h] [-o ORGANIZATION] [-p PROJECT] [-t TEMPLATE_PATH] [-y YEAR]
            [--vars] [license]

positional arguments:
  license               the license to generate, one of: agpl3, apache, bsd2,
                        bsd3, cddl, cc0, epl, gpl2, gpl3, lgpl, mit, mpl

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -o ORGANIZATION, --org ORGANIZATION
                        organization, defaults to .gitconfig or
                        os.environ["USER"]
  -p PROJECT, --proj PROJECT
                        name of project, defaults to name of current directory
  -t TEMPLATE_PATH, --template TEMPLATE_PATH
                        path to license template file
  -y YEAR, --year YEAR  copyright year
  --vars                list template variables for specified license

0.3

• Generate source file headers for some liceneses
• Discover available licenses at runtime
• Use getpass module for retrieving username
• Better unicode support for Python 3 (thanks to astagi)
• Add Creative Commons licenese (thanks to rjnienaber)

0.2

• Add AGPL 3 license
• Add extra templates variables to GPL 2 and 3

0.1

• Initial release