Hi, There's been a number of discussions around this, here's my position as an incubation mentor.
1. The ASF's policy for license headers is at https://www.apache.org/legal/src-headers.html 2. As mentioned there, headers are not required for files "without any degree of creativity in either its literal elements or its structure" 3. Such exceptions should be defined in a single place to be practical - I suppose that's NetBean's main or parent pom 4. The fewer special cases the better, as those need to be reviewed for each release - and discussions about special cases might be more effort than just adding the headers. 5. If tools provided by NetBeans generate code, the result should obviously *not* contain an Apache license header. I suppose user settings can define which header the current user wants, if any. 6. If 5. is problematic for some types of templates, it's fine to add a temporary exception for those templates, covered by a jira ticket that describes the problem and gives it a unique ID. Fixing that would be low priority but I think it should still be considered as a bug. Hope this helps clarify things and happy to answer any questions. -Bertrand
