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Would be good to have some clear UI for working with copyright messages & licensing information. Right now, it is very hidden, within Tools | Templates, but tricky to configure. Would need to be implemented better for both Ant and Maven. http://blogs.oracle.com/geertjan/entry/project_level_license_settings_in
Probably the default license header (the current 3-line placeholder message) should be hyperlinked with a custom hyperlink provider; when clicked, a dialog would appear prompting you to pick a license for the current project. Probably needs SPI; a project type's impl might open the Properties dialog to a page where a license can be selected if such a UI exists, or show a one-time dialog with a pulldown, or open pom.xml and insert a <licenses> section, whatever.
Or better, make the default header empty, but show an message in the notification area warning the user that the current project has no defined license and prompting to fix that. The user may not care, and inserting placeholder text is more annoying than helpful.
I assume that this is more a project-related stuff than editor's so moving to projects component.
I agree. An empty default header would be ideal. Then a hint (yellow lightbulb) right at the top of the class which, when clicked, would prompt a file to be selected, which can either be set to be the project-level license, or as the license for this specific file -- the user being able to choose which of the two they want.
Note how it is done in IntelliJ IDEA: "Project Settings, create a Copyright Profile, copy the boilerplate text into there, Source | Update Copyrights, done." See the discussion here: https://blogs.oracle.com/geertjan/entry/project_level_license_settings_in
First of all, there is _nothing_ in the IDE's help sets which discusses how to manage licenses. A blog post is not a substitute for formal and thorough documentation. Second, documentation is not a substitute for a proper UI, and to begin with there is no GUI for setting ${project.license}! For Ant-based projects (and apparently also PHP projects), this could just be a combo box in the Sources tab listing currently defined licenses. For Maven, you can define <netbeans.hint.license>, or you can use a standard <license> with a <url> matching a well-known one (cf. bug #211644); you should be able to set the license (using <license> if possible, else <netbeans.hint.license>) in a combo box in a project or a parent POM. An action to _update_ licenses in existing files would be useful as well; our current infrastructure is not really capable of doing this, only of inserting headers in newly created files. Assigning to the "Templates" component for ease of searching, though really needs a variety of changes across different parts of the IDE.
IMHO this was fixed by issue #226773. I've also added a proposal to change the text of default license - issue #229276. Thus are you fine with closing this as fixed?