See http://netbeans.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=199560#c4 for background. I am not sure who uploaded 1.3.9 to Maven Central, but the POM for the annotations JAR is incorrect; it fails to refer to the JSR 305 JAR, which is a compile-time dependency. JDK 6 javac can crash as a result.

By the way - it seems that development is now happening on code.google.com/p/findbugs, yet findbugs.sourceforge.net makes no direct mention of this (and still has an open issue tracker with recent additions).

Refiled as: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3341597&group_id=96405&atid=614693