I have several (Java) projects under maven control, developed in Eclipse, repo under Mercurial/bitbucket that I licence under Apache2 (though this question applies to any licences). What is the best way to licence this?
I have included a verbatim copy of the (Apache) LICENCE.txt in the top directory of the project. However there is no licence in any of the source files so that if they are re-used in other projects (as I hope they can be) they may get separated from the licence info. [Source files can be configuration/data as well as code and are not Java-specific]. If there are any changes to the licence then all these files will have to be edited. Possible approaches are:
- use a brief sentence to refer back to LICENSE.txt
- use a Maven licence tool if there is one?
- use an Eclipse licence tool if there is one?
- use a Bitbucket licence tool if it has one?
[I am on Windows so I don’t want a sed/awk/grep approach]
UPDATE – have accepted @Nicmancol as the first answer given worked for me
UPDATE2 – Hmm. It has added a licence to all sorts of files in the distrib. Not such a good idea
You can use the Maven License Plugin or the License Maven Plugin