One profile may not deactivate another profile. Starting with Maven 2.0.10, one or more profiles can be deactivated using the command line by prefixing their identifier with either the character '!' To disable a profile we can use the ‘!' Active Maven Profiles it ssems as if the last occurance of a profile element in the pom.xml is used. You can declare a Maven profile with the activeByDefault tag in the POM that activates only if Maven doesn’t find any other active profiles. Let’s say that you’re using an activeByDefault Maven profile in your build process. --> true usePluginRegistry