What do the stats on mvnrepository.com mean and how do independent OSS developers publish their artifacts?
Disclaimer, I have been using Sonatype for years but I only stumbled over the Maven Central stats recently.
Looking at the stats for Maven Central, it claims to have 1.6M packages published this year, whereas Atlassian is 100K, down from 1M in 2019 and Sonatype has only about 5K, down from 500K in 2017. This makes me think Atlassian and especially Sonatype are "dying". The biggest contributor seems to be JetBrain's KTor but even that is only 2/3 of what it was in 2022.
When I search the web for ways to upload something to Maven Central, the only way to do this appears to be one of these two:
a) via oss.sonatype.org:
- https://www.jetbrains.com/help/space/publish-artifacts-to-maven-central.html
- https://maven.apache.org/repository/guide-central-repository-upload.html (See section "Other Projects" for non-Apache projects)
- https://dzone.com/articles/how-to-publish-artifacts-to-maven-central
- https://blog.10pines.com/2018/06/25/publish-artifacts-on-maven-central/
b) or, if you are a big company, getting your own hosted repository indexed by Maven Central
I am aware that Sonatype appears to be managing Maven Central.
My questions:
- Why does everyone advertise Sonatype but nobody uses it? Even JetBrains advertises oss.sonatype.org despite having their own KTor? Do you always need a Sonatype account even if you are not publishing via Sonatype?
- How do independent OSS projects publish their projects? Apparently it is not via the big known ones (Atlassian, Sonatype, KTor, Hortonworks, Spring, ...). The numbers don't seem to add up.
- Is there something that I fundamentally misunderstand about what the Maven Central stats mean?
EDIT Fixed mentioning of Maven Central vs Maven Repository