I've been central to the OSGi specifications since 1998, mostly as the specification editor. Around 2000 I started tool development which led to the bnd tool. The primary tool to make OSGi bundles. It runs in virtually all build tools like Gradle, Eclipse, Ant, Maven, SBT, Intellij, etc. Especially the Eclipse plugin, Bndtools, is not only an excellent high-quality example of an OSGi application build by bnd, it is also one of the most joyful IDE experiences that I am aware of 😎. Trust me, it also works excellently for non-OSGi applications while leveraging OSGi metadata to not have surprises in runtime.

Not only did my work in bnd drive many innovations in the OSGi specifications, like the Declarative Services annotations or its type-safe configuration model, bnd also contains very extensive knowledge about OSGi. This makes it detect many common errors early. The OSGi reference implementations and test suits are maintained in an OSGi build. Even IBMs Open Liberty is a very large bnd workspace.

This bnd tool has grown to a sizable project with almost 90 contributors. If you use Eclipse PDE you might want to consider moving to Bndtools/Gradle or bnd/Maven; you'll be surprised how much work and errors disappear from your daily life.

A secondary project I run is aQute-os where I host open-source projects that do not fit the bnd umbrella well. You can find OSGi utilities and a very efficient, innovative, OSGi based OpenAPI/Swagger library that will get Jersey users emotional.

A tertiary, very exciting activity is Alloytools. Alloy is a formal specification language with a highly interactive user interface. After reading the book [Software Abstractions] I fell in love with it but found there was no open-source home for this incredible software. With the active approval of Daniel Jackson, we created an open-source project on Github (using Bndtools) that has had several releases.

Last but not least, due to my work with OSGi, especially in embedded environments, I have gained a profound knowledge of the Java plumbing, including their attempt at modularity.

Of all these projects I am one of the owners and a key committer. A significant amount of my time is spent adding features to bnd, Bndtools, and Alloytools; answering questions on the mailing list & managing the projects. The rest of the time goes to helping customers get the maximum out of OSGi.

I actively seek sponsorships that are willing to add features, improve documentation, testing, or work on issues. Or just sponsors that realize that open source does imply a responsibility to give back; sponsorships are a perfect substitute if you cannot contribute in kind.