All University of Auckland (UoA): Group Applications projects should use this or a decendant of this POM as a parent.
It defines distribution to Maven Central, enforcement rules around SNAPSHOTs, the version of the Java compiler we will use, project binding and a flag "uoa.release" that is by default set to "dev", and gets set to "release" when we are releasing the artifact, allowing plugins to use this as a differential trigger.