It is time to go.
After 25 years on the bridge of OSGi it seems time to retire. Over the last years my customers matured and did not need my expertise anymore, they had it learned OSGi themselves. In the past 25 years they were always replaced with new customers but now it remained eerily silent. I do still see many places where OSGi is used but those cases either the developers have more than enough knowledge to not need me or they made such a mess of it and just want to get rid of OSGi thinking the next technology will be better. My key specialty, converting large, complex, and messy systems to OSGi or setting up new systems based on OSGi, has become scarily low in demand. I still believe in the technology though, I’d happily take on no cure no pay contracts, but the technology seems to have run its course.
It is not a big deal, I am 66 and had a good working life. Besides, AI and 3D printing are incredibly cool technologies that take up all my time nowadays.
These activities are the reason I will stop with bnd, 25 years after I started with btool while working for Ericsson Research because I was frustrated with writing the manifests by hand. Although maintaining bnd wasn’t a major amount of work, the lack of revenue made it harder and harder to justify deviating my attention from the AI and 3D printing.
I am not sure how the bndtools organization will continue. I guess we will work something out among the people still active.
I will handle one more release, 7.2, probably in about 3 months.
Peter Kriens
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Hi Peter,
Thanks for all these years you have invested in developing and maintaining Bnd. I think it is fair to say that Bnd is instrumental for maintaining an OSGi-based application, and your efforts have enabled a lot of us to build our OSGi-based applications!
Though we may not have had many direct interactions, I have always valued your opinion on software design, and have learned a lot from reading along discussions here and elsewhere!
I wish you all the best on your next endeavours, and hopefully there is enough of a critical mass to continue bnd’s maintenance in some way!
Arnoud.
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Thanks Peter for all the work you put into OSGi and bnd / bndtools. It was great to have had the chance to work with you closely in the last 1-2 years or so since I became more active.
Though I regret been a bit late in the game, being a silent user since 10+ years and just became active some time ago. As @glimmerveen said I also learned a lot just by reading your content in blogs, discussions and github.
I will miss the “bnd friday bash” zoom calls although the “bashing” seemed to have taken place before I joined 
I will also miss your visual and flowery language mixed in your writings. My favorite is still the sentence about how bnd and bndtools became one:
“… After beating him up, which even took a special trip to the UK where we worked for 8 hours in a hotel lounge, he surrendered and thus our long term fruitful collaboration was born.”
The OSGi folks always have been great and most knowledgeable people I met. It’s a pitty I has not become as mainstream as hoped. But I still feel OSGi and bnd has its place and also no replacement. So I will stick around and try to be part of the next gen 
I wish you all the best and hope to see you popping up here and there from time to time.
Greetings from sunny Thailand,
Christoph
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