I have some proprietary.jar that I need to include in my project, but I don't wish to install it to the local repository.

What I did initially was to put the jar into version control in my project's lib/ folder, and then specify the Maven dependency as:

<!-- LOCAL DEPENDENCY -->
<dependency>
    <groupId>topsecret</groupId>
    <artifactId>proprietary</artifactId>
    <version>0.0.1</version>
    <scope>system</scope>
    <systemPath>${basedir}/lib/java/proprietary.jar</systemPath>
</dependency>

However, this becomes a big problem when my project becomes someone else's dependency. Maven will not be able to validate this POM because the path is not absolute.

What is the best way to overcome this problem?