Recent discussion on infra and elsewhere says that things which are source-release assemblies need to be on the Apache Mirror system. Likewise, things normally put on Maven Central for distribution via Maven, normally have sources.jar, but not source-release assemblies (especially for multi-module assemblies).
We can update our build system to do better with source-release assemblies, by adding a configuration to not "attach" them to the build - they'll be in target, but won't be uploaded by maven to snapshot / staging repos. I'm +1 for doing this, I think. Other opinions? -Marshall