Version property in dependencies is not expanded correctly

The Spring poms, for example spring-beans, version 2.0.2 use the following dependencies:
<dependency>
<groupId>$

</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-core</artifactId>
<version>$

</version>
</dependency>
Which means, they are using variables in the poms. In some cases, these variables are resolved correctly, but in some cases however they are not, causing problems.

Imho, it would be better to resolve variables for released poms to avoid any problems (or if variables are allowed, this is a maven bug then)