The OSGi Alliance, which was founded over twenty years ago, will be dissolved and its projects will be handed over to the Eclipse Foundation. In the OSGi blog, the president of the organization announces the step that will take place in line with the EclipseCon 2020. Like most events this year, the latter will take place online.

The two organizations have been close for a long time. Both have deep roots in the Java environment: The OSGi specification describes a modular system and a service platform for Java that implements a dynamic component model. OSGi used to stand for “Open Services Gateway inititative”. The Eclipse Foundation hosts numerous Java projects, including Jakarta EE, the Enterprise version as the successor to Java EE, which Oracle handed over to the Eclipse Foundation three years ago.

An early symbiosis of the two projects, to be precise since Eclipse 3.0 in the year 2004, is also the implementation of Eclipse plug-ins as OSGi bundles. This makes the development environment one of the first enterprise applications beyond the OSGi specification, which was originally aimed at the embedded environment, which in turn has significantly shaped its further development.

Founding times and members In the past few years, the OSGi Alliance hosted its community event as part of the EclipseCon, at which it 2019 celebrated its twentieth year Existence celebrated. This makes it five years older than the 2004 established Eclipse Foundation. At the time, OSGi founding members included IBM, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Ericsson and Philips. Deutsche Telekom, Bosch, Software AG, NTT and Adobe, among others, were added later.

The two organizations also have numerous joint members, and the Eclipse-Equinox project has been the reference implementation for several years of the OSGi framework. In March the OSGi Alliance proposed the eighth version of the OSGi specification, which has not yet been implemented. OSGi Release 7 is still up to date.

Twenty years of change Dan Bandera, President of Allianz, describes in the blog post the change of the last twenty years and the changed conditions that ultimately led to the decision to hand over the project to Eclipse. He explains that Oracle had taken over Sun Microsystems and at the same time IBM and Oracle are no longer the biggest names in the tech industry as they were at the turn of the millennium. At the same time, the open source area developed massively. Twenty years ago the foundation stones for this were the 1999 founded Apache Software Foundation and, at the time, slowly growing hardware support for Linux.

Open now -Source projects the most important source for software developers to access open techniques and standards. The OSGi Alliance needs the open source projects as a reference implementation. In addition, the “Code First” approach largely characterizes open standards. As examples, Bandera lists the Jakarta EE platform and the OASIS Open Projects.

New home Therefore, after careful consideration, the OSGi board decided that the best step was to hand over all of the organization’s assets to the Eclipse Foundation so that further development can take place there. At the same time, the board of directors dissolves the OSGi Alliance.