“When you make a creative work (which includes code), the work is under exclusive copyright by default. Unless you include a license that specifies otherwise, nobody else can use, copy, distribute, or modify your work without being at risk of take-downs, shake-downs, or litigation. Once the work has other contributors (each a copyright holder), “nobody” starts including you.” - choosealicense.com
Therefore, if you want others to be able to use your code to reproduce and/or build upon your findings, you have to explicitly allow this by adding a corresponding license to your GitHub repository. Head over to choosealicense.com to find out which license suits your needs best.
Select your preferred license from the website, copy the license text into a file called LICENSE (without a file ending), and put it in the root directory of your project and put it on GitHub.
Note: This website, example project, as well as the corresponding GitHub repositories are published under the permissive MIT license.
See, that was fast, wasn’t it? Next, we’ll tie everything together and learn how to write a readme file.