Yes, normally this would work and the explicit dependency would win. The problem in some of our dependency trees has to do with artifacts that changed their name. So maven doesn't know that these two are really different versions of the same thing. AS --> ejb3 --> jboss-logging-jdk AS --> jboss-common-logging-jdk The transitive one might actually come first in the classpath, because maven builds the tree doing a depth first traversal (This appears to be fixed in 2.0.9 http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNG-1412). So jboss-logging-jdk needs to be excluded from the ejb3 dep tree in the AS dependencies. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4136681#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...