Maven - Is Maven Really a URL Based Distribution System?

Maven is an open source software distribution system. It uses a simple URL based way to distribute packages, but it's more security conscious than any of the others that I know about. One interesting thing in Maven that I was surprised by was that when you sign something, your artifacts in Maven, you use a key that has an email address in it. And so there's no actual kind of identity association there, which is kind of unfortunate. But at least there's some nice things there associated with verified identities.