I see lots of questions in Netbeans forums about Templates and project license and developers has problems with configuring it. If you want to add a project license and associate it with your project, you need to add a license property in your project configuration file. The property file “nb-configuration.xml” lies in your project folder, in my case:

Erhan-Bagdemirs-MacBook-Pro:NetBeansProjects merodach$ pwd
HOME/NetBeansProjects

You have to add just”” in your properties:

<properties xmlns="http://www.netbeans.org/ns/maven-properties-data/1">
     ...
    <netbeans.hint.license>mylicense</netbeans.hint.license>
     ...
</properties>

and create a new licence file under:
HOME/.netbeans/6.9/config/Templates/Licenses

after a new installation of Netbeans (i have the version 6.9.1), there was no License folder. If you can’t see this folder, just create it and create a license file accordingly:
HOME/.netbeans/6.9/config/Templates/Licenses/license-mylicense.txt

The name of the license file is important and must follow this naming template:
license-${project.license}.txt

${project.license} is the property which you added with ““.

Open “Template Manager” on your IDE, following the menu path “Tools > Templates”. For Java classes the template seems like this if you open template in your editor:

and you can see the path to your license and how it is associated with your project. We make no changes in the template and just create now a new java class to test our license (in my case, apache’s open source license):