Yes it does. A good local repo will cache it. They act as mirrors. Once its cached, and your build is working fine, you can force all your developers to use

Yes it does. A good local repo will cache it. They act as mirrors. Once its cached, and your build is working fine, you can force all your developers to use only your local repo. This solves all non-determinism problems by allowing you to have complete control over all version of all deps and plugins. Take a look at how to configure settings.xml to force your users to use only your local repo. As far as <dependencyManagement> tags -- the point of that is to hard-code the version of foo in one spot, like this: <dependencyManagement> <dependency> <groupId>com.example</groupId> <artifactId>foo</artifacatId> <version>1.1</version> <dependency> </dependencyManagement> In child pom, you then have this if you need foo: <dependency> <groupId>com.example</groupId> <artifactId>foo</artifactId> </depdendency> And if you use something like Archiva, and force your users through it via settings.xml, then the first time someone downloads foo, Archiva gets it from the web, caches it, all other requests for foo go to Archiva. If foo has a transitive dependency, it will also get fetched from the web one time and cached in Archiva. Thus, guaranteeing that your build is deterministic -- unless you explicitly change foo/bar in Archiva yourself.