Enterprise OSGi: two is obviously better than one

I think OSGi is important for several reasons. I think Enterprise OSGi is an interesting approach, particularly as it leverages JEE. I've even contributed to some of the work, for example around the transactions component. JBoss is doing a lot of implementation work around OSGi too.

I have to admit that I haven't been paying close attention to OSGi for a few months. However, I had heard about the new Apache Aries project. Unfortunately I just heard from a friend about the Eclipse Gemini project. Now I've been involved with standards long enough to have experienced first hand the political games that rivals play with each other. It's unfortunate because it rarely benefits users, tending to obscure the reasons for choosing one approach over another, confuse people, and ultimately delaying the uptake of the standard or technology involved.

Maybe I'm missing the underlying reasons why Oracle and SpringSource decided that Aries wasn't the right project for them. However, I really wish that as an industry driven primarily by technologists we could leave the politics behind and try to work far more collaboratively, and particularly where open source is concerned! As a slight aside, that's one of the things I really like about HPTS: it doesn't matter which company you're from, people talk and interact freely to try to better our collective understanding of problems and lessons learnt.

Update: I should point out that in the paragraph above I wasn't siding with Aries over Gemini, simply that Aries started first.