Open source software on GitHub is not truly open without a proper license, as licensing explicitly allows others to modify and reuse code, rather than just viewing it. GitHub has observed a consistent trend where only about 20% of public, non-forked repositories are licensed, a number that slightly increases to 30% when including forked repositories. The introduction of choosealicense.com and a license picker in mid-2013 aimed to simplify licensing decisions and saw a spike in the adoption of popular licenses like MIT, Apache, and GPL. While MIT remains the most popular, other licenses are still used by some projects. To help developers license their projects more easily, GitHub uses a Ruby gem called Licensee to identify licenses and has introduced a Licenses API preview to provide detailed information about a project's license. This initiative is part of GitHub's broader effort to encourage open source licensing, offering users templates and tools to facilitate the process, and planning further analyses on how licensing impacts project success. Ben Balter, the author, has a background in managing GitHub's security, compliance, and community management efforts, and has played a significant role in promoting open source adoption.