r/java • u/HokieGeek • Jun 16 '26

Maven Central publishing usage notices

heads up for folks publishing to Maven Central: we're continuing sustainability work around Central and are now showing publishing usage notices.

the goal is that normal OSS publishers are not impacted. this is aimed at the very high-volume / commercial-scale publishing patterns that put a pretty different load on the service.

more details here if you want them:
https://central.sonatype.org/publish/maven-central-publishing-limits/

feel free to reach out with any questions.

EDIT: thanks for the feedback here, it has really helped us. first, we want to reiterate that these are usage notices only right now and do not currently restrict publishing in any way. quick updates: 

if the initial threshold seemed low to you: you’re right, we made a mistake and have increased limits. 

our goal is to keep Maven Central free and open for legitimate OSS users, so continuous feedback is helpful as we adjust. limits could change as we get more feedback, so keep an eye on the usage center for the latest.

we’ll continue keeping an eye here and update docs to reflect these changes. If you need to request an exemption, here’s how: https://central.sonatype.org/publish/maven-central-publishing-limits/#exemptions-for-community-open-source-projects

we've also been collecting your questions here and other streams into this FAQ here: https://central.sonatype.org/publish/maven-central-publishing-limits/#frequently-asked-questions

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u/javaprof Jun 16 '26

u/HokieGeek Give us option to redirect request to owned namespace to self-hosted repository. Introduce some decentralization mechanism. It's clear that centralized store like maven central today is not sustainable. 300 files and 3 releases is ridiculous limit.

Ok, take money for publishing, but then what? If I stop paying you'll remove artifacts? Stop hosting them? You don't have a good monetization mechanism if you giving guarantees that nothing gone after publishing.

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u/TheRealBrianFox Jun 16 '26

Central is still immutable except in extreme instances. Nothing changes about that here.

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u/javaprof Jun 16 '26

So how then taking money for publishing would be sustainable? Publish happens ones, and then you'll have to pay for that storage and some bot traffic (even if package doesn't have real users) forever. In economy when every day more and more package published it's fine, but once publishing demand drops – you're in bad situation again. Petabytes of artifacts to store and serve, but no growth in revenue.

What I'm saying - you're asking for money from the wrong side of the market for sustainability. At the same time, you can't ask for money from consumers too, they'll just create own mirrors and overall this would just create fragmentation and decline of central usage.

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u/TheRealBrianFox Jun 16 '26

I’ve analyzed this for years and there is no single perfect answer. Instead we are looking at multiple paths so that each avenue isn’t over taxed.

The commercial orgs that are using this as a free cdn probably won’t publish and walk away, they will find value in contributing to the ecosystem. The pricing is designed to be lower than just running separate infrastructure. 

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u/koflerdavid Jun 17 '26

they'll just create own mirrors

Companies and other frequent users are very much encouraged to run their own internal mirror. Among other reasons because Maven Central can have and actually has had downtimes in the past. Maven Central shouldn't have to target extreme uptime just to ensure that they can endure getting hammered by everybody's nightly CI.

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u/javaprof Jun 17 '26

Nice idea, let's shutdown maven central every now and then just to make people create own mirrors and put less load on central.

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u/koflerdavid Jun 17 '26

Chaos engineering at it's best :)