Alternative to Visual Studio Marketplace Gains Momentum
The Eclipse Foundation has launched a new Working Group in coordination with Google, Salesforce and others to accelerate the development of the Open VSX Registry, a vendor-neutral alternative to the Microsoft Visual Studio Marketplace.
The Visual Studio Marketplace is Microsoft’s site where developers can look for all types of extensions imaginable for the company’s flagship Visual Studio IDE, Azure DevOps Services, Azure DevOps Server and Visual Studio Code.
Project Momentum
Based on the momentum of the Eclipse Open VSX project, the foundation decided the project merited its own working group to manage its continued evolution and growth, said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation.
“The Open VSX Registry has experienced significant momentum at the Eclipse Foundation,” he said. “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.”
Milinkovich noted that the new working group, with initial members including Google, Huawei, Posit, Salesforce, Siemens, and STMicroelectronics, will assume the management of the Open VSX Registry from the Eclipse Cloud DevTools Working Group, which formerly managed the effort.
The Eclipse Foundation itself assumed management of the Open VSX Registry two years ago from Typefox, which built it using the Eclipse Open VSX project.
In contrast to the Visual Studio Marketplace, the community-supported Open VSX Registry offers free access to extensions that can be used with any technology or tool that supports them. The Open VSX Registry currently hosts nearly 3,000 extensions from over 1,500 different publishers. Developers have used more than 40 million extensions since 2021, with downloads now exceeding 2 million per month, the foundation said. Meanwhile downloads of extensions for the Visual Studio IDE alone average over 700,000 per month.
Still, the Eclipse Foundation faces an uphill battle in wooing Microsoft developers, particularly with fit and finish of extensions.
Not a Numbers Game
But numbers are not the foundation’s goal as much as providing an open source approach to deliver technologies for Visual Studio (VS) Code extensions to help developers to avoid being locked into proprietary models and marketplaces, the foundation said.
“Although VS Code is open source in the sense that you can get the source code for almost all of it when you download VS Code from Microsoft, it is a Microsoft product. You’re accepting a non-open source end user license agreement and Microsoft is collecting telemetry data about your use of VS Code,” Milinkovich told The New Stack when the foundation took control of Open VSX Registry in 2021. “The extension ecosystem that’s built up around VS Code is definitely one of its strengths, and Microsoft operates a registry for VS Code extensions, but the terms of use say that it’s only available for accessing extensions for Microsoft products.”
Vendor Support
Meanwhile, major software providers such as Google, Salesforce, Siemens and others have warmed to the idea of an open registry for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code extensions.
“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,” said Thomas DeMeo, director of developer tools, Google Cloud, in a statement. “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.”
Meanwhile, Dan Fernandez, vice president, developer services at Salesforce, added, “We 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.” Fernandez spent nearly 20 years in Microsoft’s Developer Division, most recently as a principal group program manager, and he knows the Visual Studio ecosystem quite well.
In addition to Salesforce Code Builder, the registry includes open source solutions like Eclipse Che and Eclipse Theia, as well as Google Cloud Workstations, Gitpod, SAP Business Application Studio and other applications based on Eclipse projects.
