The Eclipse Foundation today announced it will make available a managed instance of the Open VSX Registry available to industry partners for a fee.
Thabang Mashologu, chief marketing officer and head of products at the Eclipse Foundation, said the Open VSX Managed Registry provides an economically sustainable approach to providing access to a registry that is now widely invoked within application development workflows that incorporate tools based on open source VS Code.
Initial customers of the Open VSX Managed Registry include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Cursor, which will continue to incorporate the registry in the services they provide application developers. That approach provides a means to support application development teams using those tools without requiring them to sign up for an additional service provided by the Eclipse Foundation.
That registry maintained by the Eclipse Foundation has been consuming significant infrastructure resources as more AI coding tools from AWS, Google, Cursor, Windsurf and IBM are more widely adopted, noted Mashologu.
The Open VSX Registry already serves more than 300 million downloads per month, with peak daily traffic exceeding 200 million requests. The registry also hosts more than 12,000 extensions from more than 8,000 publishers.
Hosting a global extension registry at this scale requires significant investment in compute capacity, bandwidth, storage, security operations, and the engineering expertise necessary to maintain availability and resilience, noted Mashologu. In the AI era, those costs have skyrocketed, he added.
Designed to run in multiple regions, the Open VSX Managed Registry provides enterprise-grade reliability and accountability while preserving open governance, vendor neutrality, and free access for developers, said Mashologu. The usage-aligned model ensures commercial consumption funds the operational investment required to keep Open VSX secure, resilient, and sustainable, he added
Specifically, it provides 99.95% availability targets with service credits, a set of defined usage tiers based on request-per-second consumption, 24/7 monitoring and tier-based incident response aligned with defined service level agreements (SLAs), capacity planning for high-volume automated workloads and identity-based access controls and usage dashboards.
It’s not clear to what degree other open source software projects that have become integral elements of software engineering workflows might follow the Eclipse Foundation’s approach for providing a managed service to defer infrastructure costs.
Each software engineering team will need to determine for itself to what degree dependencies on free services that might not be economically sustainable have been embedded into its workflows. Last year, leading stewards of several major open source projects issued a joint open letter calling for major changes to be made to the way the IT infrastructure used to support these initiatives is funded, operated and maintained. Posted on the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) website, the open letter signed by representatives from open source projects such as Maven Central/Sonatype, OpenJS, The Python Software Foundation and The Rust Foundation called for fundamental reforms to be made in terms of both how IT infrastructure is funded and the way open source software is being consumed.
One way or another, the one certain thing is that, unlike open source software itself, the infrastructure used to host these projects is anything but free.