Felix is a community effort to implement the OSGi R4 Service Platform, which includes the OSGi framework and standard services, as well as providing and supporting other interesting OSGi-related technologies. The ultimate goal is to provide a completely compliant implementation of the OSGi framework and standard services and to support a community around this technology. Felix currently implements a large portion of the OSGi release 4 specification, but additional work is necessary for full compliance. Despite this fact, the OSGi framework functionality provided by Felix is very stable.

OSGi technology originally targeted embedded devices and home services gateways, but it is ideally suited for any project that is interested in principles of modularity, component-oriented, and/or service-orientation. OSGi technology combines aspects of these aforementioned principles to define a dynamic service deployment framework that is amenable to remote management. As an example of a simple use case, Felix can be easily embedded into other projects and used as a plugin or dynamic extension mechanism; it serves this purpose much better than other systems that are used for similar purposes, such as Java Management Extensions (JMX).