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Let's say I have created a new Android project. Even at the initial state, there is a project template and a lot of necessary/unnecessary files created by Android Studio. Now I want to publish this project on GitHub, with a very permissive license (let's say The Unlicense). How would this work?

Of course I have the right to license my own code with whatever license I want. But there are files (libraries, assets, config etc.) that I don't own inside the project. Maybe they are licensed under a less permissive and incompatible license (for example Apache License) or don't have a license at all. Would it be right if I add a LICENSE file to my repo's root and put the license text for my license (for example The Unlicense) in it?

My question is not specific to Android Studio, it is just an example. Even some CLI tools initialize projects with such files as well.

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  • Could you give more information about the extent of the templates? For example, a template with lots of support code like Bootstrap is a template that would get its own copyright protection. Many other templates are very generic and likely don't have any originality other than what you add to them.
    – Brandin
    Oct 13, 2022 at 4:02
  • Also, if a template includes a LICENSE file, I would want to know if the intention was, that the author was licensing the template itself under that particular license, or if the intention was, that you are supposed to change the LICENSE file to suit your needs. So you'd probably need to read in the documentation of (say) Android Studio to see if a license of the template files themselves is specified.
    – Brandin
    Oct 13, 2022 at 4:03
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    Please provide a link to the T&Cs of the development tool that inserts its files and templates into the project. This will be the main impacting factor for the answer to your question. It will be impossible to provide a generic answer for any and all tools.
    – Martin_in_AUT
    Oct 13, 2022 at 7:06
  • @Brandin If the Bootstrap you are talking about is the one at getbootstrap.com, I don't think it could be called a template; it is a CSS library. It is a dependency of your project, so it is a separate project with its own license, rather than being a part of your project. It is something you "use" in your project, not something "in" your project. What I'm talking about is some boilerplate code that you build your project upon, it "becomes" your project.
    – Osman Nuri Yıldız
    Oct 18, 2022 at 19:51
  • @OsmanNuriYıldız It's been many years since I used it, but when I used an older version of bootstrap, it was possible to completely download and completely include it in a web project, so in the cases in which I used it, it became completely part of my app (no dependency on bootstrap.com, for example). Perhaps the current version is different. In any case, I mention bootstrap only as a hypothetical example.
    – Brandin
    Oct 19, 2022 at 5:57

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