A New Era for the Open VSX Registry

Friday, December 18, 2020 - 06:57 by Brian King

Last week on December 9, we completed the transition of the public instance of the Open VSX Registry at https://open-vsx.org to the Eclipse Foundation. I previously wrote about this, and the implications for you, especially if you publish extensions. This post is a followup with some reminders and further information.

The handover went smoothly, with very little disruption of service; and at the time of this writing, the site is running well with a healthy number of requests coming in. This would not have been possible without the hard work and months of preparation by the project team. Special mention and thanks to Sharon Corbett for project management on the Eclipse Foundation side; Miro Spönemann of TypeFox, who developed the bulk of the new features; Mikael Barbero for setting up the new infrastructure and integrating changes; and Christopher Guindon for extending the Eclipse authorization API. 

Publisher Requirements

This is an important reminder for extension publishers. If you are a publisher to the Open VSX Registry, there are two items that will require your attention if you have not already done so:

  • You will be required to accept the Eclipse Publisher Agreement

  • You will need to ensure that your extensions are published under a license

More details on how to do this can be found in the previous post; and I would also urge you to read the documentation for publishing extensions.

You have until January 8 January 29 to complete these steps, and if not done by that date then published extensions will be deactivated, which means they are no longer available from the UI and API. If you complete the requirements at a later date, the deactivated extensions will be reactivated.

Namespace Changes

Due to increasing security concerns by adopters of Open VSX, namespaces can no longer be public. Starting Dec. 17 2020, only members of a namespace have the authority to publish.

This change has the following consequences:

  • When someone creates a namespace, they automatically become a contributor of that namespace.
  • Extensions are shown as verified in the UI if the publishing user is a member of the namespace and the namespace has at least one owner. Otherwise the extensions are shown as unverified with a warning icon and an explanatory banner.
  • Namespaces with no members are considered as orphaned (previously they were public).
  • All previous publishers to an orphaned namespace have been added as contributors of that namespace.
  • Orphaned namespaces with no published extensions have been deleted.

This change does not affect the publishing process if you create the namespace yourself. For more information on namespaces, refer to the Namespace Access documentation page.

Issue and Requests

The source and configuration of open-vsx.org was moved to the Eclipse Foundation organization on Github and is now at https://github.com/EclipseFdn/open-vsx.org. Issues about availability of the website, namespace requests and deletion requests should be reported at that repository.

Legal questions, complaints and reports of abuse should be sent to license@eclipse.org.

Get Involved

Here are some ways to get involved in the Open VSX project right now:

Today, there’s growing momentum around open source tools and technologies that support Visual Studio (VS) Code extensions. Leading global organizations are adopting these tools and technologies. This momentum has spurred demand for a marketplace without restrictions and limitations. Thanks for joining us on the journey as we build this out, and we look forward to continued innovation from you in 2021.

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OpenVSX
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VS Code Extensions