I just reported it to netbeans issuezilla issue 169074.

I was trying to use these variables as pointed out by Michal Hlavac in my post about templates. And then I realized that these variables don’t seem to work for Netbeans Plaform Application projects. Instead of the project name and display name they (the template variables, I mean) get replaced by an error message

Expression project.name is undefined on line 10, column 19 in Templates/Licenses/license-gplv3.txt

Then I tried to use those same variables in a regular java application project and they seem to work fine for that kind of project. So I think is an issue involving only Netbeans Platform Application projects. Let’s see what they reply to the issue.