Commons OpenPGP was started to produce a common and simple interface for generating and verifying OpenPGP signatures.
Currently implemented using BouncyCastle, it is intended to allow pluggable providers so that alternate open source and commercial providers can be used.
The library was started by Maven and Ant committers to enable the use of OpenPGP from these tools. Currently, Maven uses it in its development version to sign libraries released to the repository.