These license files are for use with the license-maven-plugin: http://mojo.codehaus.org/license-maven-plugin/ The projects' respective pom.xml files have the appropriate license-maven-plugin configuration to make use of them. To update a project's LICENSE.txt files, run: mvn license:update-project-license To update the license headers at the top of each source file, run: mvn license:update-file-header