type: service
status: active
timestamp: 2026-06-20
tags: [services, extension-store, vscodium, cursor, theia, eclipse, distribution, primary]

Open VSX Registry

Eclipse Foundation's vendor-neutral VS Code extension registry — free OSS, no card

Open VSX Registry

Role

Mandatory second publish target for every oriz-*-vsc-ext repo. Open VSX (open-vsx.org) is the Eclipse Foundation’s vendor-neutral, OSS extension registry — the only VS-Code-compatible marketplace that VSCodium, Cursor, Theia, Gitpod, code-server, and several other community editors are allowed to consume by default (the official VS Code Marketplace’s terms forbid third-party clients).

Every VS Code extension dual-publishes to here and to the VS Code Marketplace, per decisions/architecture/distribution-and-queues-locked.md.

Free tier

Free, fully OSS (EPL-2.0).
Unlimited extensions, unlimited versions.
No developer fee, no review fee, no per-install fee.
Publisher namespace approval is a one-time PR to eclipse/openvsx listing the publisher’s GitHub identity.

Card / subscription required?

NO. Open VSX is a free Eclipse Foundation service; tokens are issued via Eclipse Foundation account login (free, no card).

CI auto-publish

- name: Publish to Open VSX
  run: |
    pnpm exec ovsx publish dist/extension.vsix \
      --pat "$OVSX_PAT"
  env:
    OVSX_PAT: ${{ secrets.OVSX_PAT }}

ovsx (@vscode/ovsx) is API-compatible with vsce. The same .vsix artifact submitted to the VS Code Marketplace is reused. Credentials in Doppler → GitHub Secrets.

Who reads from Open VSX

VSCodium — community FOSS rebuild of VS Code, defaults to Open VSX.
Cursor — AI-first VS Code fork, defaults to Open VSX (with partial fallthrough to Microsoft’s marketplace).
Theia / Gitpod / code-server — cloud + browser-based IDEs that legally cannot use Microsoft’s marketplace.
Eclipse Che — same constraint.

Skipping Open VSX means our extensions are invisible to every user on those platforms.

Alternatives

VS Code Marketplace — sibling, required.
JetBrains Marketplace — different IDE family, walked back as a publish target. See decisions/architecture/distribution-and-queues-locked.md.

Swap cost

Low — ovsx publish is one CI step against a well-defined REST API.

Why this is our pick

Reach. Open VSX is the only publish target that captures every non-Microsoft VS Code descendant — and that user base is growing fast (Cursor in particular). The cost of adding it is one CI step and a one-time namespace PR.

Cross-refs

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