After shipping the OSGi Core Release 8 in December, the OSGi Working Group (WG) is now incubating at the Eclipse Foundation. The OSGi WG (previously named "OSGi Alliance") announced the move to Eclipse last October. It already ratified the charter, created two committees and two working groups, and migrated its code repositories. The OSGi Working Group is still debating how its specification process will work in the future.
The OSGi Alliance was founded in 1999 as a vendor-independent foundation. Companies like Adobe, IBM, Bosch, and others backed it to provide a modular component-based runtime for Java. The OSGi Working Group (WG) saves money by joining an existing foundation, compared with running its own. On March 16, the WG gave an update on the transition.
The OSGi WG Steering Committee is the overall governing body of the WG. That makes it the most critical new entity. It is now up and running following its charter. The committer representative in this committee will be elected in May.
The OSGi WG Specification Committee currently has the same members as the Steering Committee. It adopted the Eclipse Specification Process for now. It. It is still up for debate whether Requests for Proposal (RFPs) and Requests for Comments (RFCs) will be used in the specification process and if so, how. The mailing list and the OSGi Specification Project call minutes document this discussion.
The specification work will happen in the OSGi Specification Project. As part of the transition to Eclipse, the Git repository with the specifications, implementation code, and the Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK) is now public. That is also true for the old RFPs and RFCs.
Technology closely related to the OSGi WG now is also public as part of the new OSGi Technology Project. That includes the OSGi Testing Support with JUnit classes or OSGi enRoute for building modular distributed applications.
The WG blog entry hints at the complexity of joining the Eclipse Foundation. This is a familiar story: Last year, MicroProfile delayed their 4.0 release to establish an Eclipse Working Group first. It also took Adoptium (formerly known as AdoptOpenJDK) several months to ratify its charter, as the project needed to complete some negotiations with Oracle prior to ratification.
The old website at osgi.org is still up but no longer maintained. A new website for the WG is yet to be announced. However, the OSGi Technology sub-project already has a proper home at Eclipse.