JSR 291 rubber-stamp?

My colleague Jim Colson was interviewed by SD Times for the article "OSGi, JCP Tussle Over Component Support in Java: Critics decry effort as a rubber-stamp move".

The piece notes that JSR 291 is an additional source of requirements for OSGi, but doesn't go into specifics. It ends by quoting Hani Suleiman as saying "I was told that this is in fact a rubber-stamping effort and that the OSGi spec will not change".

So is this just a matter of hearsay and opinion or are there some relevant facts? Did the OSGi specification pop out of JSR 291 without any input from the Expert Group?

Well a number of specific requirements were raised by the JSR 291 Expert Group and resulted in changes in the underlying OSGi specification.

Take a specific example of a non-rubber-stamp change: the addition of an API to enable declarative service support and other similar features to obtain the Bundle context of a specific bundle.

This requirement was initially raised by BEA on the JSR 291 Expert Group mailing list as part of a thread relating to SPIs. (I'm glad we decided to run the Expert Group mailing list in the open!)

Since then the new Bundle.getBundleContext method has appeared in the early draft and public review draft specifications and in the Equinox open source reference implementation.

Does that seem like rubber-stamping to you?