If you ever decide to publish code that you've written, note that it will automatically fall under the protection of copyright law. This means that distributing copies of your code, or using it as a basis for something that may be construed as derivative work is prohibited. As a result, people will generally stay clear of your project since they don't know what your intentions are.

In the 1980s, Richard Stallman pioneered concepts known as free software and copyleft. Free software is software distributed with a guarantee that the end user can modify and adapt it for whatever purpose, profit included. In order for this to happen, the user must have ultimate control over the software in question, which implies access to the source code. So, for a piece of software to become “free software” it must include a public license such as the GNU General Public License, MIT license, etc. These licenses waive part of the author's rights and and grants them to the recipient of the software. Almost all free-software licenses contain a copyleft provision. This provision states that when modified versions of the free software are distributed, it must provide the same guarantees as the original, under the same license (or a more permissive one).

In this exercise you will manually add a GPL license to your bot. If you want to learn more about different kinds of licenses (or licenses in general), listen to this episode of the Destination Linux podcast. If you want to go straight to the discussion on each individual license, skip ahead 10m relative to the timestamp in the video.

Following these indications on how to use GNU licenses, add GPLv3 to your project. Create a single commit with all the changes (i.e.: COPYING file, copyright notice, etc.) and push it. You don't need a copyright disclaimer from the school, so don't worry about that part.