license-and-legal

license-and-legal is a skill for Claude Code from the-open-agent/oss-skills. It costs 103 tokens per session (2,244 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A guide for choosing and applying an open-source license, the rules that say how others may use, change, and share code.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to compare licenses, add copyright and license notices, manage contributions, check dependency compatibility, or handle relicensing questions.
Why use it?
It helps avoid unclear usage rights and compliance problems as contributors, dependencies, or commercial users become involved.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the oss-skills plugin — 18 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to compare licenses, add copyright and license notices, manage contributions, check dependency compatibility, or handle relicensing questions.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/the-open-agent/oss-skills/license-and-legal
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add the-open-agent/oss-skills --skill license-and-legal
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/the-open-agent/oss-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install oss-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 18 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for license-and-legal

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/the-open-agent/oss-skills/license-and-legal/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/the-open-agent/oss-skills/license-and-legal)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/the-open-agent/oss-skills/license-and-legal"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/the-open-agent/oss-skills/license-and-legal/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for license-and-legal

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/the-open-agent/oss-skills/license-and-legal"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/the-open-agent/oss-skills/license-and-legal.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 103 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,244 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00103 $0.02244
Opus 5 $0.00051 $0.01122
Sonnet 5 $0.00021 $0.00449
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00224

Measured 12d ago against content hash 473d560f4c0d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

license-and-legal scanned grade A with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/licenses/license-templates/master/templates/apache.txt -o LICENSE
skills/license-and-legal/SKILL.md · 190 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 190 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Licensing decisions are cheap before the first external contribution and expensive after. Get this right early.

This skill provides engineering guidance, not legal advice. For relicensing a project with outside contributors, employer IP questions, trademark disputes, or anything with money attached, tell the user to consult a lawyer. Say it once, clearly, then give the best engineering answer you can.

Choosing a license

Ask what the user actually wants, in this order:

  1. Do you want maximum adoption, including inside proprietary products?MIT (shortest) or Apache-2.0 (adds an explicit patent grant + trademark clause). Apache-2.0 is the better default for anything with patent surface or corporate contributors. MIT is the better default for small libraries where brevity matters.

  2. Do you want modifications to your code returned to the commons, but allow linking from proprietary software?MPL-2.0 (file-level copyleft) or LGPL-3.0 (library-level, more restrictive in practice).

  3. Do you want anything built on this to also be open source?GPL-3.0. Understand the cost: many companies have blanket policies against GPL dependencies, so adoption drops sharply.

  4. Same as 3, but the software will be run as a network service?AGPL-3.0. Closes the "SaaS loophole." Adoption cost is even higher; some companies ban it outright.

  5. Do you want to prevent competitors from offering it as a hosted service?BSL 1.1, Elastic License 2.0, or SSPL. Be explicit with the user: these are not open source by the OSI definition. Do not call a BSL project "open source" — the community reaction to that mislabeling is consistently harsh. "Source-available" is the accurate term.

Defaults worth stating: Apache-2.0 for most new projects, MIT for small libraries, AGPL-3.0 if the business model is hosting, and honesty if the answer is source-available.

Read the full file on GitHub · 190 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 190 lines · 103 tokens per session scan A 473d560f4c0d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

license-and-legal is a skill published in the GitHub repository the-open-agent/oss-skills (5 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 103 tokens to every session and 2,244 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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