It looks like the spring 2.5 jars that where uploaded to the official maven repository are broken. The full spring jar is 321 kb large and only contains the spring aop classes.
Anyway I added springs own repository to my pom and then i got the correct jar and sources
<repository>
<id>spring</id>
<name>Spring Portfolio Repository</name> <url>https://springframework.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/springframework/repos/repo</url>
</repository>
I’m not sure that’s correct. I just downloaded (through a browser) the full Spring JAR from http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/springframework/spring/2.5/spring-2.5.jar. When I opened it up, it had everything I’d expect in there.
It is fixed now. They cheekily modified the repository.
it doesnt look like its fixed
http://www.mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.springframework/spring
it looks like the whole release got pulled or something like that
ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/packages/maven2/org/springframework/spring/
or it might just be a problem with that mirror