The Open VSX Registry, based on the open-source Eclipse Open VSX project, currently hosts around 3,000 extensions from over 1,500 different publishers, with new publishers and extensions being added daily. Since the Open VSX Registry's launch in 2021, developers have consumed over 40 million extensions, and the current number of downloads exceeds 2 million per month. To manage and facilitate this continued growth, the management of the Open VSX Registry will now be transferred from the Eclipse Cloud DevTools Working Group to a new working group, whose initial members include Google, Huawei, Posit, Salesforce, Siemens, and STMicroelectronics.
“The Open VSX Registry has experienced significant growth within the Eclipse Foundation, so much so that it deserves its own working group due to its continued evolution and expansion,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. “By creating a neutral platform with a true open-source model for these extensions, we can ensure that this marketplace is community-driven, not controlled by a single vendor.”.
The Open VSX Registry addresses the market need for a fully open-source approach to marketplace technologies for Visual Studio (VS) code extensions. It increases transparency and flexibility for extension users, publishers, and tool developers, especially those who leverage cloud-based development tools and IDEs but want to avoid being tied to proprietary models and marketplaces.
As an open alternative to the Visual Studio Marketplace, the Open VSX Registry offers free access to extensions that can be used with any compatible technology or tools. These include many open-source solutions such as Eclipse Che and Eclipse Theia, as well as Salesforce Code Builder, Google Cloud Workstations, Gitpod, SAP Business Application Studio, and other Eclipse-based applications.
Furthermore, since Eclipse Open VSX's own code is open source, any company can add code and reuse it to create a registry of internally hosted and managed extensions for its own developers to publish and consume VS Code extensions.
More information at open-vsx.org.
