[sarnowski]

Tbh, if your company relies on this software, I would also make sure that it cannot just vanish - and thats the most efftive solution. Artifacts can disappear from the internet and you don't know if the downloaded stuff is still the same as before. Especially, if you look outside of the maven ecosystem, but even there you have to rely on apache and their partners. An outage can mean that you cannot deploy critical bugfixes to your platform.

[adambatkin]

This is why you should have repository manager like JFrog Artifactory or Sonatype Nexus which can transparently proxy third-party repositories (like Maven Central).

[sarnowski]

This is true for Maven. The Maven repository project is very impressive and outstanding in its kind anyways. But leaving this great repository you are often on your own. Look at what happens to Google Code. How much stuff will be lost when its shut down? Hopefully nothing that you depend on. Its nice to have the binaries in a backup maybe but without access to the code, maintenance will be a nightmare.

[daxelrod]

Both of those products also handle other kinds of package repositories as well. You're right that they don't cover the full spectrum, however.