I came across this problem a few years ago, and at the time there wasn't an easy way to get hold of the binaries using Maven. I didn't find an elegant solution to this problem, so I did what anybody who is into open source software would do: I wrote a plugin to do it for me.
This plugin allows you to specify a series of driver binaries to automatically download and remove the manual setup steps. It also means that you can enforce the version of driver binaries that are used, which removes lots of intermittent issues caused by people using different versions of the binaries that can behave differently on different machines.
We are now going to enhance our project to use this plugin; the new project ...
