Update on the OSGi Working Group

Dear OSGi enthusiasts,

It has been a couple of months since we announced the move of your favorite Specification Organization to the Eclipse Foundation. We have been silent since, but this does not mean that we have been inactive. So we want to use this chance to give you a brief update on the current state of affairs.

In early January we started our work, by forming the OSGi Working Group Steering Committee. We basically started the Working Group (WG) up by ratifying the Charter. Despite our Veterans on the Committee, we needed to find our feet and learn how to navigate the new waters of the Eclipse Foundation. Thanks to the tremendous support we receive from the Eclipse Team we persevered and made a lot of progress to manage the necessary formalities.

What is the current status you ask? We have formed the following bodies:

OSGi WG Steering Committee

The Steering Committee is the overall governing body of the WG. If you are interested in details on the function of the committee, have a look at the Powers and Duties section in the Charter. At the moment we have two elected Participant members in addition to the Strategic members with a permanent seat. The seat for an elected Committer representative is currently vacant and an election will take place in the May timeframe, as soon as the Projects are completely set up and everyone has had sufficient time to join. 

For the time being, we have adopted the vanilla Eclipse Specification Process as suggested by the Specification Committee. All the specification work will fall under the Implementation Patent License. We are currently working on the migration of the old Alliance assets (Website, Twitter etc.) and to chaperon the projects that are being set up as we speak.

OSGi WG Specification Committee

This committee governs the Specification Process and votes on the final Specifications. It thus steers the technological direction our Specifications will take. For more details you can again look at the charter. 

At the moment it is composed of the same members as the Steering Committee. The real work of the committee will start once specification work begins in the OSGi Specification Project. We need to get a feeling for the Eclipse Specification Process and need to see if we want to make adjustments.

OSGi Specification Project

This is where the magic happens. All specification work will be done in this project. It is already open to join, however you must be a member of the OSGi Working Group to be a project committer. The original OSGi github repository was handed over to the Eclipse Foundation and is now public. It is currently undergoing final integration into Eclipse Foundation processes. As soon as this is done, we can commence our actual specification work. How we will proceed with the design repository, is still an open point and will be addressed soon. We are currently discussing things like: Do we want to keep RFPs and RFCs?, How will they be written in the future?, etc.  If you want to get on the notification train for this project, please subscribe to the project's mailing list. The

OSGi Technology Project

Here our companion projects like osgi-test or OSGi enRoute. If you are a committer already or plan to become one, please join the project. Becoming a committer in this project does not require you to be a member of the OSGi Working Group.

What else?

The old osgi.org website is dead and the current version is just a placeholder. Creating fitting and prevailing content is currently discussed and we hope to get the new version online as soon as possible. Javadoc and Specifications are still available under docs.osgi.org.

There are a lot of other minutiae we will not bother you with. We still have a lot of work ahead of us and as a volunteer army, everyone who is willing to help is welcome. So please spread the word. 

We try to get everything up and running as soon as possible and will keep you posted.

You Committee Team.