From the project page: The original goal of JGit/EGit was to provide an Eclipse plugin for working with software using the Git SCM. The Eclipse plugin is still

From the project page: The original goal of JGit/EGit was to provide an Eclipse plugin for working with software using the Git SCM. The Eclipse plugin is still the main goal of many of the developers, but we are open to anyone wanting to interface with other tools, Netbeans, Ant, Maven etc. For those, the JGit part provides a high performance API for working with Git repositories. The main other user of JGit, besides EGit, is Gerrit Code Review, which used by projects such as JGit (ofcourse), EGit (by implication) and Android. Not sure if that provides a very good motivation, but there you go. :)