Data In Motion has been commissioned by the Sovereign Tech Fund to modernize the OSGi ecosystem over the next 12 months.
Open source infrastructure underpins much of the software world, but it often goes underfunded. That is exactly the gap that the Sovereign Tech Agency was created to close, by using a range of dedicated programs, including the Sovereign Tech Fund. OSGi got selected as one of the technologies to be improved.
OSGi (Open Services Gateway initiative) is a mature, battle-tested framework for building modular Java applications. At its core, it solves a problem that every large Java project eventually runs into: as codebases grow, managing dependencies, versioning, and the lifecycle of components becomes a tangled mess. OSGi brings order to that complexity.
Where standard Java treats an application as a single monolithic classpath, OSGi introduces the concept of bundles - self-contained units of code that explicitly declare what they provide and what they need. The OSGi runtime manages these bundles dynamically: they can be installed, started, stopped, updated, and removed at runtime without restarting the entire application.
OSGi is the foundation beneath some of the most widely used Java platforms in the world — including the Eclipse IDE, Adobe Experience Manager, many enterprise application servers, and countless embedded and IoT systems. If you have used Eclipse or built on top of it, you have already relied on OSGi without necessarily knowing it.
Data In Motion is a long-time contributor to the OSGi ecosystem, and is proud to have been commissioned to lead this effort to the next level. Together with the community (including the BNDtools project), Data In Motion will coordinate work across several targeted improvement areas over the coming year.
If you want to learn more about OSGi, check out the project at:
