Basically, all Maven is telling you is that certain dependencies in your project are not available in the central maven repository. The default is to look in your local .m2 folder (local repository), and then any configured repositories in your POM, and then the central maven repository. Look at the repositories section of the Maven reference.
The problem is that the project that was checked in didn't configure the POM in such a way that all the dependencies could be found and the project could be built from scratch.