Free Maven Repository Hosting for Open Source projects by Sonatype

I'm very excited to see Sonatype support maven repositories for Open Source projects that use maven. In all honesty, they didn't have to do this. Unfortunately, the java.net repo was harming the maven reputation. I've had direct experience using the java.net maven repo and can say it was an unpleasant experience. When we open sourced our 4 JBI (Java Business Integration) Components their home existed on java.net and we used the their maven repo. It was difficult to upload anything and it seemed to be constantly down.

Before this announcement, open source java projects using maven didn't really have an option as to where they could publish their artifacts. To my knowledge neither Google Code or Sourceforge offered this capability. Apache and Codehaus did and obviously you still have the Maven Central (http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/), but I never went through the process of what it took to use them. Now it doesn't matter where your project is hosted. Hopefully the next thing to come is free Continuous Integration services in the cloud using Hudson. I think this is the next step for project hosting sites like Google Code and github.

Providing free maven repos I think has a lot of benefits and not just for maven users. For example, this should benefit all dependency management tools that are built on top of maven repos. I'm not 100% sure tools like Ivy, Grape, Gradle, and Buildr use maven repo's, but my guess is they do and this will benefit those users. Another benefit is being able to standardize on maven repositories, hopefully preventing users from searching where they can find your artifacts. I've wasted a lot of time in the past trying to find valid repositories where I could find artifacts for a project I was wanting to use.

I'm also very impressed with the features Sonatype is providing. Not only will they support release artifacts but SNAPSHOT's as well which could consume a lot of space. You'll also be able to easily sync with Central. Finally, they will support a staging repo in order to test things out before officially releasing.

So go sign up and thanks Sonatype. Also, read this post to learn how to release your project using the maven release plugin.