Open source licenses on popular GitHub repos

Among the 2,500 repos that have a page on RepoTrending on Oct 23, 2026, MIT is the most common license, on 953 repos, followed by Apache-2.0 on 489. Another 212 repos have no license at all, and that group includes repos with more than 100,000 stars.

Every count below is about those 2,500, not about GitHub as a whole, and every license name is the identifier GitHub reports for the repo, except two labels that are ours: “No license” (GitHub reported none) and “Other” (GitHub reported a license without a standard identifier). This guide is for a developer who wants to know what popular repos use before choosing a license, or before reusing someone else’s code. It is not legal advice: we say what the data shows and nothing about what a license allows.

Which licenses are most common among the 2,500 most starred repos?

MIT comes first with 953 repos, Apache-2.0 second with 489, and the group we label “Other” third with 373. On Oct 23, 2026, 212 repos show no license, which puts “No license” fourth, ahead of GPL-3.0 with 137.

The table shows the twelve most common of the 28 labels in the data; the other 16 are smaller. One detail we didn’t expect: AGPL-3.0 (109) is more than twice as common as BSD-3-Clause (46) on this list. We haven’t looked into why, so we won’t guess.

The 2,500 are the most starred of the 12,468 repos we track, so these are counts for popular repos only. What 12,468 GitHub repos look like explains how that list is built, and it counts languages, ages and topics, which this guide leaves alone.

Which licenses do the newest repos pick?

The same two lead. Of the 175 repos on the list that were created in 2026, 97 are MIT and 41 are Apache-2.0, with “Other” third at 17.

The other 3 repos created in 2026 carry one label each that the table leaves out: GPL-2.0, CC0-1.0 and CC-BY-4.0.

The one place the order flips is the GPL family. Across all 2,500, GPL-3.0 (137) beats AGPL-3.0 (109). Among the 2026 repos, AGPL-3.0 has 8 and GPL-3.0 has 2. Those are small numbers, so read it as a hint and not as a trend.

For repos created before 2020, the biggest counts are MIT 552, Apache-2.0 259, Other 228, No license 139, GPL-3.0 71, BSD-3-Clause 37 and AGPL-3.0 34. We counted that group by license but didn’t save its total, so we leave shares out. Don’t read the two groups as a clean comparison either.

Every repo with a page has at least 18,279 stars on Oct 23, the lowest count among the 2,500, and the least starred 2026 repo on the list has 18,572. A repo created in 2026 had months to reach that count and an older one had years, so the 2026 group holds only the fastest.

What do the repos with no license look like?

The five most starred repos with no license:

The top one, codecrafters-io/build-your-own-x, is also the most starred repo we track. The list isn’t only old repos either: multica-ai/andrej-karpathy-skills was created in 2026, and it is one of the 7 repos from that year with no license.

If you want to reuse code from one of these, such as the 183,754-star 521xueweihan/HelloGitHub (created May 4, 2016), open the repo, look for a license file, and ask the owner. We can’t tell you what you are free to do.

Which popular repos use MIT or Apache-2.0?

Both labels cover some of the most starred repos on the list. Under MIT, the top three on Oct 23, 2026 are public-apis/public-apis with 491,441 stars, openclaw/openclaw with 392,794 and morluto/rea with 366,708. Under Apache-2.0 they are tensorflow/tensorflow with 201,189, huggingface/transformers with 168,002 and Snailclimb/JavaGuide with 159,211.

Note the difference in size: the biggest Apache-2.0 repo has fewer stars than the third MIT repo. That is a fact about this list and says nothing about which license is better. You can open tensorflow/tensorflow to see the numbers we hold for it.

morluto/rea also sits on the Claude Code repos page, and the license is one of the checks in how to find Claude Code repos worth trying. For the wider AI corner, the AI agent repos page lists the repos under the ai-agents, mcp and coding-agents topics.

Why does “Other” appear so often?

“Other” is the label our collector gives when GitHub reports a license without a standard identifier it can match (collector/discover.mjs). It covers 373 of the 2,500 repos, which makes it the third biggest group, so it is not a rounding error.

We haven’t checked which licenses sit behind it, and we haven’t read GitHub’s documentation on how it assigns identifiers, so we won’t explain it further. Don’t confuse it with the language “Other” in the guide on languages, ages and topics: that is a different label from a different field, and the two groups are not the same repos.

What does this sample hide?

It hides every repo outside the 2,500, and it cannot tell you why an owner chose a license. We take every public repo with 5,000 or more stars, plus recent ones above a star floor, and only the 2,500 most starred get a page. A small repo with an unusual license, or none, is likely missing. How we rank lists the full method.

There are three more limits. The license label is what GitHub reports; we don’t read the repos’ files ourselves. We don’t check for bought or farmed stars yet, so the star counts above show what GitHub displays and nothing more. And the page list changes from Oct 24, when the biggest gainers start to come first, so these counts will move. That is why each number here has its date.

Frequently asked questions

Which license do most popular GitHub repos use?

We can’t answer that for all of GitHub. Among the 2,500 most starred repos we track, MIT is the most common, on 953 repos, ahead of Apache-2.0 on 489, on Oct 23, 2026.

Is a GitHub repo with no license free to use?

We can’t tell you. On Oct 23, 2026, 212 of the 2,500 repos we track show no license on GitHub, which only means GitHub reported none. Ask the owner and read the repo itself. This is not legal advice.

Are new GitHub repos choosing different licenses?

Partly. Among the 175 repos created in 2026 that have a page, MIT (97) and Apache-2.0 (41) lead, as in the whole list, but AGPL-3.0 (8) outnumbers GPL-3.0 (2), the reverse of the whole list (GPL-3.0 137, AGPL-3.0 109).

Why does Other appear so often in the license counts?

Other is the label our collector gives when GitHub reports a license it cannot match to a standard identifier. It covers 373 of the 2,500 repos on Oct 23, 2026, third after MIT and Apache-2.0. We haven’t checked which licenses sit behind it.

Where to look next

• How to check a GitHub repo before you depend on it: the license is the first of five checks, with the other four.
• The all-time list: the most starred repos, each with a page you can open to check its license.
• AI agent repos: the 165 repos under ai-agents, mcp and coding-agents.
• How we rank: how the 12,468 repos are found and how star gains will be counted.

Data used

Source for every row: RepoTrending, GitHub REST API (public repository search, read-only), snapshot of Oct 23, 2026 (collector export repos.json, run of 2026-10-23), counted by RepoTrending.

More guides

• How to check a GitHub repo before you depend on it
• Stars per year: comparing old and new GitHub repos
• Daily, weekly or monthly: which window to watch?
• Find Claude Code repos worth trying (Oct 2026)
• GitHub trending alternatives: what each one counts
• How does GitHub decide what is trending?
• Stars gained vs total stars: which says more?
• Trending badge for your README, and what it says
• What 12,468 GitHub repos look like