You're right, Spring is not mandatory, I just used it for convenience (is it totally banned from JBoss developments?).

This has nothing with a ban to do However, as you say yourself Spring is not needed for OSGi. If we want to address issues related to OSGi we should keep the solutions as generic as possible so that they fit many different usecases.
I guess what I am trying to understand is how this relates to BVAL-251 and HV-523.
What exactly does it mean that I publish the validator factory as an OSGi service and how does this relate to general Bean Validation bootstrapping.

This script is easily upgradable, you just have to put the OsgiValidatorFactory in a fragment or publish as an OSGI service (you can name it SimpleOsgiValidatorFactory).

Well, maybe you could provide a patch, because I am still not quite clear on this

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