Appendix B. The OSGi ecosystem
This appendix explains where OSGi came from, who owns it, and where it’s going. It also gives an overview of the various OSGi specifications and how they relate to each other.
OSGi as a technology is owned by the OSGi Alliance, a nonprofit industry consortium funded by a large number of member companies. The OSGi Alliance is responsible for developing and releasing OSGi standards, as well as maintaining Compliance Test suites for the standards that they create. Importantly, the OSGi Alliance also ensures that reference implementations for the various standards are available under reasonably business-friendly software licenses, but typically it doesn’t maintain them. The ongoing maintenance and development of OSGi specification implementations typically resides with the open source project or company that created them. Most OSGi standards have more than one implementation available.
The OSGi Alliance is organized into a number of different Expert Groups. An Expert Group consists of a number of OSGi experts from various OSGi Alliance member companies who are interested in particular applications of OSGi. These experts meet regularly to discuss bugs, new requirements, potential new specifications, and specification drafts. Of the several Expert Groups within the alliance, two are particularly relevant to enterprise OSGi developers. These are the Core Platform Expert Group (CPEG) and the Enterprise Expert Group (EEG).