The Eclipse Foundation has announced the formation of the Open VSX Working Group with the aim of managing and accelerating the take up of the Open VSX Registry as a vendor-neutral, community-supported alternative to Microsoft's Visual Studio Marketplace.

The Eclipse Foundation is one of the world's largest open source software foundations, and is home to over 400 open source projects including the Eclipse IDE and Jakarta EE.

The Open VSX Registry was launched in 2021 and is built on the Eclipse Open VSX open source project. It already hosts around 3,000 extensions from over 1,500 different publishers. Since its launch, developers have used it to make use of more than 40 million extensions, with downloads now exceeding two million a month.

The popularity and growth of the registry is the driver behind the foundation creating the new working group. Management of the registry will now shift from the Eclipse Cloud DevTools Working Group to a new working group, with initial members including Google, Huawei, Posit, Salesforce, Siemens, and STMicroelectronics.

Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, explained:

"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. 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 Eclipse Foundation says the registry will increase transparency and flexibility for extension users, publishers, and tool developers, and avoid developers being locked into proprietary models and marketplaces.

The registry offers free access to extensions that can be used with any technology or tool that supports them, including open source solutions like Eclipse Che and Eclipse Theia, as well as Salesforce Code Builder, Google Cloud Workstations, Gitpod, and SAP Business Application Studio.

The fact that the Eclipse Open VSX code itself is open source also means that organizations can contribute to the registry code and reuse it to create an internally hosted and managed extension registry for publishing and consuming VS Code extensions.

The Open VSX Registry is available now.

More Information

Open SVX Registry

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