Foreword

It was during the very hot summer of 2003 that I first heard of Richard S. Hall. During a coffee break, a colleague from Deutsche Telekom told me that the local university had a teacher who was very much into OSGi. This teacher was the author of Oscar, one of the first open source OSGi frameworks. In 2003, wholeheartedly adopting OSGi was rare, so I was intrigued. Also around that time, Eclipse was investigating moving to a new module system, and I was asked to participate as an OSGi expert. I thought Richard could be valuable for this, so I asked him to join the Equinox committee. That innocent invitation started an enormously long email thread that hasn’t ended yet and, I hope, never will. Richard is often abrasive when specifications aren’t clear, or worse, when we attempt to violate modular purity. Sometimes I think he physically feels pain if we have to compromise on a dirty feature. As an invited OSGi researcher, he has became one of the key people behind the specifications, making sure we don’t bloat the framework and always follow our principles.