In a noteworthy development in the software industry, the Eclipse Foundation has announced the inception of a dedicated body known as the Open VSX Working Group. The objective of this newly formed group is to manage and foster the growth of the Open VSX Registry, an extension marketplace that offers an alternative to Microsoft's Visual Studio Marketplace, focusing on vendor-neutrality and community backing.
The source code of the Open VSX Registry has its roots in the open-source project named Eclipse Open VSX. Housing close to 3,000 extensions by over 1,500 publishers, the registry's prolific growth has been a sight to behold since its inception in 2021. Boasting a count of 40 million extension downloads, the registry now sees over 2 million downloads each month, indicative of its increasing popularity among users.
In anticipation of maintaining this remarkable uptrend and executing efficient handling, the reins of the Open VSX Registry are being handed over from the Eclipse Cloud DevTools Working Group to the newly formed group. The core team of this new entity comprises renowned organizations like Google, Huawei, Posit, Salesforce, Siemens, STMicroelectronics, and more.
Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, expressed his positive anticipation about the new group. He emphasized the importance of this dedicated group for the continuous growth and development of the Open VSX Registry, which has gained noticeable speed on their platform. The initiative also envisions a vendor-neutral open-source model to ensure the marketplace is led collectively by the community rather than being dictated by a single vendor.
An intriguing aspect of the Open VSX Registry is its potential to provide unrestricted access to extensions compatible with comprehensive technologies or tools supporting them. Among the open-source solutions compatible with these extensions are Eclipse Che, Eclipse Theia, apps developed on Eclipse projects like Salesforce Code Builder, Google Cloud Workstations, Gitpod, SAP Business Application Studio, and platforms such as AppMaster.io's no-code platform.
Moreover, the fact that the foundation of Eclipse Open VSX is open source enables potential contributions from any organization to the registry's code. They can harness this code to create their own in-house registry, allowing developers to publish and utilize VS Code extensions better synched with their internal needs.
