The Eclipse Foundation revealed the establishment of the Open VSX Working Group. This new group’s mandate is to supervise and expedite the adoption of the Open VSX Registry, a vendor-neutral, community-backed alternative to Microsoft’s Visual Studio Marketplace.
Derived from the Eclipse Open VSX open-source initiative, the Open VSX Registry presently houses close to 3,000 extensions provided by over 1,500 unique publishers. With new additions happening daily, the registry has seen substantial growth since its launch in 2021, reaching over 40 million extension downloads and now surpassing 2 million downloads every month.
To ensure efficient handling of this escalating growth, control of the Open VSX Registry will transition from the Eclipse Cloud DevTools Working Group to the newly established group. The founding members of this new group include Google, Huawei, Posit, Salesforce, Siemens, STMicroelectronics, and more.
“The Open VSX Registry has experienced significant momentum at the Eclipse Foundation, so much so that it merits having its own working group for continued evolution and growth,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. “By creating a vendor-neutral home with a true open source model for these extensions, we can ensure that this marketplace is guided by the community, and not just a single vendor.”
The Open VSX Registry provides unrestricted access to extensions compatible with any technology or tool that supports them. These include various open-source solutions such as Eclipse Che and Eclipse Theia, alongside Salesforce Code Builder, Google Cloud Workstations, Gitpod, SAP Business Application Studio, and other applications built on Eclipse projects.
Furthermore, given that the underlying code of Eclipse Open VSX is open source, any organization can contribute to the registry code. They can also leverage this code to establish an internally managed extension registry. This in-house registry allows their developers to publish and utilize VS Code extensions.
