Publishing licensed artifact to Maven Central Repository

Question

I need to push our project API's (bundled jar) to Maven Central Repository. As Part of that,i have gone through this link . However, am quite confused whether our project is eligible to publish in maven central repo,

• Our API is not open source. it need to distribute only to client who purchase from us. is Maven provides any restrictions to download jar only for specific user who has some key etc?

• POM.xml is requesting for licensing information. ours is not open source, if we allowed to publish, what should be licensing content in pom.xml?

• Why we have to give our repo information in pom.xml? we are using bitbucket and hence providing the repo url is not accessible for others. can we have dummy repo or it is mandatory?

Please help me out guys.

Answer 1

Everything you publish to maven central will be available to everyone in the world.

For your use case, you can consider hosting your own maven repository. Check sonatype nexus, artifactory, archiva... With your own repo, you can configure a password in your server. Then your clients will need to configure your server in their pom.xml or settings.xml to download your artifacts.