There are numerous problems with the Maven repositories on Java.net, and individual projects are being penalized for poor development infrastructure at Java.net. We hear no end of complaints about the poor quality of Maven Repositories at Java.net: mixing of Maven 1 and Maven 2 repositories, the mixing of releases and snapshots, lack of javadocs, sources, signatures, bad project metadata, and general inability of Java.net to provide any coherent means of delivering valid repository content to the Maven community.
This is not a problem with any particular project at Java.net, it's the infrastructure provided by Java.net that isn't up to par. You need to provide a decent Maven repository infrastructure for projects to deploy their content to, and you need to provide instructions about best practices on how accomplish this properly. Java.net has done neither, so I figured instead of continuing to complain --and continuing to field the complaints of Maven users-- I'm going to do something about it.
On March 5th, 2010 Juven Xu and Marvin Froeder from Sonatype will start servicing any and all requests from Java.net projects to migrate their Maven Repository infrastructure over to our [hosted Nexus OSS instance][1]. We will, of course, continue to service requests after March 5th, but March 5th will be set aside to specifically help Java.net projects get switched over and tested.
We generally ask that projects interested in our OSS hosting service familiarize themselves with our guide for [OSS Repository Hosting][2]. If you follow the guide and make your request we will process the requests on a first come, first serve basis on March 5th. We've helped close to 100 projects now and we'd love to help the projects at Java.net!
[1]: http://oss.sonatype.org
[2]: http://nexus.sonatype.org/oss-repository-hosting.html
