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I'm currently building a website for a small, local soccer club. I'm building it, based on a template of html5up.net/. As far as I know, their only requirement for doing so is that I give them credit. I do that, at the bottom of every page.

However, I was wondering which license I should add to this website, to be safe? I was thinking about GPL? If I remember correctly, it allows others to use my code, so long as their products are open source and use the same license. Do I need to mention this license somewhere specific on the site, or is a README file on GitHub sufficient? If possible, I'd rather not clutter the site with it.

Also, what do I do with the copyrights disclaimer? On default, the template of Html5up says:

© Untitled. All rights reserved

Do I replace Untitled by my own name? Or the one of the soccer club? I would like my own name to be credited, to be perfectly honest.

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  • Why was this downvoted? It seems like a well-reasoned and clear question to me.
    – Zizouz212
    Sep 18, 2016 at 15:04

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I am not sure what you mean by "to be safe", but assuming that you mean safe as in using the templates without violating the license under which they are available to you, you can pick any license you want for your own work as long as you credit HTML5 UP as stated here: https://html5up.net/license. I believe you doing this on the bottom of every page is quite enough.

The copyright line in the templates is for you to add your own copyright statement. Unless you have some agreement with the soccer club forcing you to use their name for any work you do for them or something like that you can use your own name.

If you want to use GPL for your website source, here's how to do it: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html

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  • What I meant with 'just to be safe' is a bit far fetched truth be told. As in, a rivaling soccer club can not copy/paste my GitHub repository, change some things and publish it as their own. I have no formal agreement with the soccer club. However they are fine with my name being credited. So I guess I can just place my name at the bottom? Kinda like I do with crediting Html5up?
    – GillesDV
    Sep 16, 2016 at 10:03
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    @GillesDV If you want to make sure that another soccer club cannot re-use your work without giving you credit, you can use the same license as the Html5up author does for his/her work. The whole purpose of that license is to make sure that the autohor is credited when their work is used by somebody else. If you want to make sure that another soccer club cannot re-use your work at all you can simply choose not make the source freely accessible on github. You are allowed to do this as long as you give the Html5up author credit on the web pages that your site displays.
    – Mans Gunnarsson
    Sep 16, 2016 at 10:17
  • Mmhmm, alright, I suppose that's a viable possibility as well. Thanks for the help!
    – GillesDV
    Sep 16, 2016 at 11:32
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The templates available on HTML5UP are licensed under the CC BY 3.0 License. That means that:

  • you can use the templates for any purpose, including personal and commercial ventures;
  • you can modify the templates however you need to;
  • you can sublicense the templates to users of your modified work;
  • you must give appropriate attribution to HTML5UP - this means a visible text blurb saying that your work is based on X template from HTML5UP, with a link back to the template.

So you're free to choose whatever license you wish to. I would suggest the MIT License for your code, and the CC BY 3.0 or CC BY-SA 3.0 licenses for your textual content.

As for the copyright statement, you should replace Untitled with the name of whoever owns the copyright to the resulting work. If you designed, built and wrote the website without being under contract to the soccer club, that's you. If you did the work under any type of contract, you may find that the contract stipulated that the copyright in the final work would be owned by the club. In that case, you would need to put the soccer club's legal entity name. Ask someone at the club to tell you what this is, if you don't know it.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and cannot dispense true legal advice. If you require advice on legal matters, don't trust random strangers on the Internet - consult a copyright or open-source lawyer for your jurisdiction.

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