One of the current problems with repositories such as http://www.ibiblio.org/maven is their inability to host products which have restrictive licensing schemes. (See http://maven.apache.org/sun-licensing-journey.html for background)
E.g, ibiblio cannot host jars from Sun, because of the requirement that users must manually accept Sun's license before downloading the jars. This reduces the usefulness of using the repository for dependency resolution. I see several possible workarounds for this: Virtual hosting --------------- With this approach, none of the artifacts are hosted within the public repository. http redirection is used to direct 'virtual' artifact accesses to the real artifact. The limitation of this approach is that automatic artifact resolution can only work if the redirect is to the real artifact. This rules out all of the Sun jars which require acceptance of Sun's license first. A tool can 'screen scrape' the redirected page, prompt the user to accept the license and only download if the license is accepted, but this doesn't work in the general case. Direct hosting -------------- With this approach, artifacts are hosted within the public repository, but download is only enabled if the user agrees to the license. This implies that http redirection must be used and that tools have to be intelligent enough to handle the redirection and prompt the user. The limitation of this approach is that direct hosting can only be supported if an agreement can be made with the license holder. Thoughts?
