"interesting dependencies on external libraries (to pick an example from Ruby, the json gem was horribly broken at 1.4.2 and generations of projects have varyin

"interesting dependencies on external libraries (to pick an example from Ruby, the json gem was horribly broken at 1.4.2 and generations of projects have varying requirements for json < 1.4.2, json > 1.4.2, and many other worse things." This seems like a java problem more than a maven problem. In fact, I don't really know what you could do about this. Maybe OSGi has a solution.