Things seem to be heating up around the compatibility between OSGi and JSR 277, in particular the different version numbering schemes. Peter Kriens, Alex Blewitt provide some good commentary for the OSGi scheme and Stanley Ho defends the proposed JSR 277 scheme.
However, Hal Hildebrand, the Oracle OSGi guru, provides the best insight into what is wrong with JSR 277: politics. For all Sun’s executive-speak about being a hip open company, they continue to behave like an old fashion hardware vendor. The non-existent JSR 277 expert group is a mockery of the JCP process and by anyone’s definition of openness. Instead of trying to create a community and build bridges between JSR277 and OSGi, Sun is using backroom tactics to find some type of ‘compromise’ between OSGi and JSR277.
Sun stop the bilateral discussions, re-boot the JSR 277 expert group with a real spec leader and start participating in the OSGi organization. In short stop the politics and start a real open discussion to ensuring OSGi and JSR 277 are compatible. Anything else is just going to be bad news for Java.
