M2eclipse, meanwhile, enables Maven searches from the Eclipse environment. "What it does is it allows Eclipse developers to work very easily with Maven," de Visser said. The commercial version will be called m2eclipse Professional.

An early user of m2eclipse concurred. "It makes developing with Maven a lot more productive," said Bruce Snyder, software engineer at SpringSource. "It integrates Maven into Eclipse and allows me to remain inside of Eclipse when I'm working on [Apache projects like] ActiveMQ or Camel." 

A founder and CTO of Sonatype, Jason van Zyl, Van Zyl was a developer of Maven.

Nexus Professional subscriptions will cost US$3,000 per year. Pricing has not yet set for the m2eclipse Professional.