In the past weeks I did several releases using the great maven 2 release plugin. And each time I got annoyed that it removes the license headers (or every header) from the pom. According to the issue tracker this has been fixed in beta-5, but actually it hasn’t (see this bug).
After being effected by this bug for far too long, I tried to find the problem. It started out, that there are poms where the license is not removed. So I tried to find the differences and then looked at the code of the maven release plugin (or precisly the underlying release manager doing the work). The current approach is very problematic as it tries to get around several known issues with the used xml implementation – this will lead to problems as soon as implementation details change and as apparent has already problems: for example it depends on the way you specify the namespace and the schema!
Fortunately there is a workaround (I mention it in the bug), but I really hope that this approach will be replaced with a more robust solution very soon!