Dependency Dilemmas: A Comparative Study of Independent and Dependent Artifacts in Maven Central Ecosystem

Maven Central ecosystem forms the backbone of Java dependency management, hosting artifacts that vary significantly in their adoption, security, and ecosystem roles. Artifact reuse is fundamental in software development, and ecosystems like Maven facilitate this process. However, prior studies predominantly analyzed popular artifacts with numerous dependencies, leaving those without incoming dependencies (i.e., independent artifacts) unexplored. In this study, we analyzed 658,078 artifacts, of which 635,003 had at least one release. Among these, 93,101 artifacts (15.4%) were identified as independent (in-degree = 0), while the rest were classified as dependent. We looked at the impact of individual artifacts using PageRank and outdegree centrality and discovered that independent artifacts were very important to the ecosystem. Further analysis using 18 different metrics revealed several advantages and comparability of independent artifacts with dependent artifacts: comparable popularity ($\mathbf{2 5. 5 8}$ vs. 7.30), fewer vulnerabilities ($\mathbf{6 0}$ CVEs vs. 179 CVEs), and zero propagated vulnerabilities. These findings suggest that independent artifacts might be a beneficial choice for dependencies but have some maintenance issues. Therefore, developers should carefully incorporate independent artifacts into their projects, and artifact maintainers should prioritize this group of artifacts to mitigate the risk of transitive vulnerability propagation and improve software sustainability.