The Open VSX Registry, a Vendor-Neutral, Community-Supported Alternative to the Visual Studio Marketplace, Gets its Own Working Group at the Eclipse Foundation

Open VSX Registry momentum merits its own Working Group to drive evolution and growth

BRUSSELS, Belgium, June 27, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The Eclipse Foundation, one of the world’s largest open source software foundations, today announced the formation of the Open VSX Working Group. The mission of the new working group will be to manage and accelerate adoption of the Open VSX Registry, a vendor-neutral, community-supported alternative to the Microsoft Visual Studio Marketplace.

Built on the Eclipse Open VSX open source project, the Open VSX Registry currently hosts nearly 3,000 extensions from over 1,500 different publishers, with new publishers and extensions being added daily. Since the Open VSX Registry became available in 2021, developers have consumed more than 40M extensions, with downloads now exceeding 2M per month. To manage and facilitate this ongoing growth, management of the Open VSX 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.

“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 delivers on the industry’s 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, particularly those leveraging cloud-based development tools and IDEs that want to avoid being locked into 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 technology or tool that supports them. These include many open source solutions like Eclipse Che and Eclipse Theia, as well as Salesforce Code Builder, Google Cloud Workstations, Gitpod, SAP Business Application Studio and other applications based on Eclipse projects.

In addition, since the Eclipse Open VSX code itself is open source, any organization can contribute to the registry code and reuse it to create an internally hosted and managed extension registry for their in-house developers to publish and consume VS Code extensions.

Interested parties can learn more or start using the Open VSX Registry immediately at open-vsx.org.

To learn more about how to get involved with the Open VSX Working Group, visit the Eclipse Foundation membership page or send email to membership.coordination@eclipse-foundation.org.

Quotes from Open VSX Working Group Members

Google
“We are excited to expand our relationship with the Eclipse Foundation and support the creation of the Open VSX Working Group,” said Thomas DeMeo, Director of Developer Tools, Google Cloud. “At Google Cloud, we want to give our customers options when it comes to working with their preferred IDE, and the Open VSX Registry furthers our ability to deliver on that goal. As both strong supporters and originators of many open source efforts, we support the customer choice and vendor neutrality that the Open VSX Registry aims to deliver.”

Huawei
“The mission of the CodeArts team at Huawei Cloud is to build the top-notch tools and services for the Huawei developer ecosystem,” said Yawei Wang, Chief Technologist of Developer Tools at Huawei Cloud. “We are committed to helping developers write and ship code faster and easier and keeping teams productive. Meanwhile, we also offer an open platform on which developers can build and publish their own extensions to suit specific business needs. The Open VSX Registry, a vendor-neutral option for IDE extensions, is essential to fulfill our mission and keep our long-standing commitment to developers.”

Posit
“The mission of Posit is to create open source software for data science, scientific research, and technical communication,” said Tareef Kawaf, President of Posit Software, PBC. “We invest heavily in open source development, education, and the community with the goal of continuing to serve knowledge creators as a 100 year company. We are happy to support the Open VSX Registry’s mission of maintaining a vendor-neutral platform for open source licensed community and professional IDE extensions.”           

Salesforce
“Salesforce is excited to join the Open VSX Working Group to support the continued growth of an open ecosystem for Visual Studio Code extensions,” said Dan Fernandez, Vice President, Developer Services at Salesforce. “We also support the Open VSX Registry with built-in access from Salesforce Code Builder, a modern, web-based development environment tailored for Salesforce development. Our official Salesforce extensions are published to open-vsx.org to allow developers to work how they want, where they want.”

Siemens
“We at Siemens are dedicated to consistently improving our automation software offerings to meet the evolving needs of automation software engineers seeking innovation and efficiency,” said Johannes Birkenstock and Jacob Hilsebein, Software Developers at Siemens. “We deeply appreciate the collaborative efforts of our partners and communities, recognising their pivotal role in fostering open and flexible toolchains. Being a part of the Eclipse Foundation’s OpenVSX Working Group allows us to empower automation software engineers by providing them with the tools they love to use.”

STMicroelectronics
“As the world’s leading supplier of general-purpose microcontrollers, ST continues to focus its embedded tools and software efforts on features and capabilities that help developers innovate more and achieve faster,” said Ricardo De-Sa-Earp, Executive Vice President, General-Purpose Microcontrollers, STMicroelectronics. “We recognize that partners and community contributions are key to building and enhancing the most comprehensive ecosystem around our products and see the Eclipse Open VSX project as a promising initiative to enlarge the possibilities offered to embedded developers even more.“

About the Eclipse Foundation
The Eclipse Foundation provides our global community of individuals and organisations with a mature, scalable, and business-friendly environment for open source software collaboration and innovation. The Foundation is home to the Eclipse IDE, Jakarta EE, and over 400 open source projects, including runtimes, tools, and frameworks for cloud and edge applications, IoT, AI, automotive, systems engineering, distributed ledger technologies, open processor designs, and many others. The Eclipse Foundation is an international non-profit association supported by over 330 members, including industry leaders who value open source as a key enabler for their business strategies. To learn more, follow us on Twitter @EclipseFdn, LinkedIn or visit eclipse.org.

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