OK guys, I had the same problem downloading a large file. We’re all probably using the lightweight HTTP wagon. If you look at the docs:

http://maven.apache.org/wagon/wagon-providers/wagon-http-lightweight/

Known Limitation:

The main limitation is that you can’t download data that doesn’t fit entirely into memory.

So I increased the memory for Maven:

export MAVEN_OPTS="-Xmx1024m"

and voila, it works. (!!!!)