TSS: Easily manage license headers of your source files with Maven

From TSS: http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=48526Licensing source code can be rough, especially if you’re changing licenses, or adding license references to code that’s already been written or generated.Modifying licenses is quite time expensive and a developer doesn’t necessarily want to spend his or her time managing headers on source files.Searching on the Internet, I found only these tools relative to license headers:

• Release Audit Tool
• The Maven 2 plugin for RAT
• Checkstyle
• Another one (which I do not remember the name) that is just a command-line tool[Editor's note: I tried to find acommand-line tool for this, to no avail. Anyone who would like to offer pointers is welcomed to do so.]

These tools lack features. Since I use Maven as a project managementtool, I wanted to have a Maven 2 plugin capable of checking if the license headers are present, in the verify phase, and of course I wanted the ability to add or update these headers. Therefore I wrote a Maven 2 license plugin available at http://code.google.com/p/maven-license-plugin/ that anyone can use in a POM like this…