Community report

The evolution of the Open VSX Registry reflects a broader shift in how open source ecosystems are operated and sustained. Now serving more than 300 million downloads per month and supporting a rapidly expanding ecosystem of cloud-based and AI-enabled development tools, the registry has become critical shared infrastructure for the global developer community.

This infrastructure now underpins a new generation of developer platforms, including AI-enabled environments such as AWS's Kiro, Google's Antigravity, Cursor, VSCodium, Windsurf, IBM Bob, Ona (Gitpod) and other VS Code–compatible tools used by millions of developers worldwide.

As adoption has grown, so too have the operational demands associated with running the service at scale. These include availability, performance, security, and global distribution, all of which are expected to meet production-grade standards. This shift highlights a broader challenge across open source: infrastructure that is widely relied upon must be supported accordingly.

In response, the Eclipse Foundation introduced the Open VSX Managed Registry in April 2026, a production-grade service designed for organisations that depend on Open VSX in commercial or large-scale environments. The managed offering provides service-level guarantees, operational accountability, and predictable scalability, aligning the operation of the registry with enterprise expectations.

The importance of this transition is reflected in ecosystem investment and adoption. For example, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has made a significant investment to strengthen the reliability, performance, and security of the infrastructure supporting Open VSX, reinforcing its role as a critical component of modern development platforms.

At the same time, initial adopters of the Open VSX Managed Registry include major technology providers such as AWS, Google, and Cursor. Their participation reflects the increasing reliance on Open VSX as production infrastructure within large-scale developer platforms and AI-driven environments.

Importantly, this model preserves the core principles of the open source ecosystem. The public registry remains open, freely accessible, and community-driven, ensuring that individual developers, open source projects, and smaller organisations continue to benefit from unrestricted access. The managed service operates alongside this public infrastructure, providing additional assurances for production use cases while contributing to long-term sustainability.

As regulatory requirements continue to evolve, Industry Collaborations provide a structured mechanism for coordinated engagement between open source communities, industry stakeholders, and policymakers.

The Open Regulatory Compliance (ORC) Working Group has become a central forum for interpreting and responding to these changes, particularly in relation to the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). In 2025, the group focused on translating the implications of the CRA into practical, actionable guidance for organisations and open source projects, while beginning to engage with emerging regulatory frameworks such as the EU AI Act, in coordination with new AI-focused initiatives across the Foundation.

A key outcome of this work is the development of a comprehensive, community-driven FAQ addressing how the CRA applies to open source software. Built from more than 100 structured community discussions, this resource consolidates legal, technical, and operational perspectives into accessible guidance, reducing ambiguity for both developers and organisations navigating compliance requirements.

Beyond interpretation, the ORC Working Group has also contributed directly to shaping the regulatory environment. Throughout the year, the community coordinated multiple formal inputs to European institutions, ensuring that open source perspectives were represented in policy discussions. Several of these contributions have already been reflected in official materials, demonstrating the tangible influence of collaborative engagement (ex. CRA Guidance).

The group also initiated work on voluntary security attestations, helping define how open source projects can align with emerging requirements under the CRA. This effort addresses a critical gap by exploring practical approaches to demonstrating security and compliance in open, distributed development environments.

To extend the reach and impact of these activities, the Eclipse Foundation formalised its collaboration with the European Cyber Security Organisation through a Memorandum of Understanding in early 2026. This partnership strengthens alignment between open source stakeholders and institutional actors, while providing a mechanism to validate and scale the outputs of the ORC community.

With more than 60 participating organisations, including over 20 open source foundations, the ORC Working Group demonstrates how open collaborations can move beyond discussion to coordinated action, delivering both guidance for practitioners and measurable input into regulatory frameworks.

A central Eclipse Foundation objective is to enable organisations to build and maintain control over complete technology stacks through open source, from silicon to application layers. This approach supports digital autonomy by reducing reliance on proprietary systems, increasing transparency, and enabling organisations to shape the technologies they depend on.

In 2025, progress toward this goal accelerated through coordinated development across hardware, runtime, middleware, and safety frameworks. Together, these initiatives form the foundation of an open, end-to-end stack designed to support both emerging and mission-critical systems.

Trust and safety frameworks

Ensuring safety and trust across the stack is essential for adoption in regulated and high-risk environments. The Eclipse Trustable Software Framework (TSF) introduces a structured, evidence-based approach to software assurance, linking system requirements to verifiable outcomes.

Developed in collaboration with Codethink, TSF was successfully audited in 2025 by Exida against IEC 61508 (SIL 3), with demonstrated compatibility with ISO 26262. This milestone provides clear evidence that open source systems can meet the stringent requirements of safety-critical environments.

By integrating safety, security, and software engineering practices across the lifecycle, TSF provides a foundation for building compliant and auditable systems on open source technologies.

Stack integration in practice

These components are designed as modular building blocks that organisations can adopt independently based on their specific requirements. Each layer delivers value on its own, while maintaining alignment with adjacent layers to support interoperability.

Through Industry Collaborations, ongoing efforts focus on ensuring these components can be combined where needed, enabling organisations to assemble complete, end-to-end systems using open technologies. This approach balances flexibility with architectural coherence, allowing adopters to scale from individual components to integrated solutions without introducing unnecessary complexity.

The Eclipse SDV Working Group represents one of the most advanced applications of Industry Collaborations, bringing together automotive manufacturers, suppliers, and technology providers to develop open source platforms for next-generation vehicles.

In 2025, the SDV ecosystem continued to expand, with growing global participation, an increasing number of projects, and deeper alignment with industry standards and regulatory requirements.

Complementary projects such as Eclipse OpenSOVD further strengthen interoperability by providing open implementations of emerging industry standards, enabling consistent diagnostics and integration across vehicle systems. This project provides an open source implementation of the Service-Oriented Vehicle Diagnostics (SOVD) standard (ISO 17978), addressing a critical need for standardised diagnostics across modern vehicle architectures.

Designed with interoperability as a core principle, OpenSOVD is intended to integrate with S-CORE as well as other platforms, enabling consistent diagnostic capabilities across systems and suppliers. Since its introduction, the project has gained strong traction within the community and is on track to become a central component of the broader SDV ecosystem.

Artificial intelligence is emerging as a foundational layer of modern software systems. The Eclipse Foundation's Industry Collaborations are focused on enabling an open, interoperable AI ecosystem that supports transparent, scalable, and governable AI development.

In 2025, these efforts accelerated, with increased investment in frameworks, tools, and standards that support the development of scalable, production-ready AI systems. This work reflects a broader shift toward open, composable AI architectures that can be integrated into enterprise and industry-specific environments.

Read about our AI initiatives

Java remains one of the most widely adopted and strategically important software platforms, forming the backbone of enterprise systems, cloud services, and critical infrastructure worldwide. The Eclipse Foundation continues to play a central role in stewarding this ecosystem, ensuring its ongoing evolution in line with modern architectural and operational requirements.

In 2025, this focus centred on advancing Jakarta EE as a foundation for cloud-native enterprise development, while reinforcing the compatibility and interoperability that underpin its broad adoption.

Platform evolution: Jakarta EE

In June 2025, the Eclipse Foundation released Jakarta EE 11, a milestone focused on enabling modern, cloud-native application development. This release builds on the Core Profile (December 2024) and Web Profile (March 2025), reflecting a deliberate progression toward more modular, lightweight, and container-friendly architectures.

Together, these advancements support the development of scalable, flexible applications that can operate efficiently across cloud and hybrid environments, while maintaining compatibility with existing enterprise systems. This phased approach allows innovation to be introduced incrementally without disrupting production deployments.

Ecosystem adoption and compatibility

The strength of the Java ecosystem is reflected in its broad and sustained adoption. It's estimated that more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies rely on Java for core infrastructure and backend development, underscoring its role as a critical component of global digital systems.

Throughout 2025 the Jakarta EE Compatible Products program expanded steadily, with 25 products participating across multiple versions, and 37 product certification requests submitted for various versions of Jakarta EE Platform and Profiles.

The continued evolution of Jakarta EE demonstrates how open source governance can sustain and modernise critical software ecosystems, balancing innovation with the stability required by global enterprises. This balance between innovation and long-term stability remains a defining characteristic of the Java ecosystem.

Through Research@Eclipse, the Eclipse Foundation works closely with European institutions and public research initiatives to translate strategic investments in digital innovation into open, reusable technologies. This model ensures that research outcomes are not confined to academic or experimental contexts, but are developed into production-ready open source assets that can be adopted and sustained at scale.

In 2025, Research@Eclipse gained significant momentum. The Foundation was awarded 8 new research projects, reflecting its growing role as a trusted partner in publicly funded innovation.

Collaboration with the European Commission and related initiatives continues to support broader objectives around digital autonomy, technological leadership, and long-term competitiveness. Looking ahead, participation in eight new projects beginning in Spring 2026 will further expand this work across emerging technology domains.

From research to open source

A defining characteristic of Research@Eclipse is its focus on transforming publicly funded research outcomes into open source projects that can be adopted, extended, and sustained by the global community. In 2025, this approach resulted in the launch of several new open source projects:

• Eclipse aeriOS – A decentralised meta-operating system that abstracts cloud-to-edge resources into a unified environment, enabling autonomous workload orchestration
• Eclipse VOStack – A W3C-compliant virtualisation layer that transforms physical IoT hardware into interoperable "virtual objects" for integration into cloud-native systems
• Eclipse KuDECO – A cognitive orchestration framework enabling real-time decision-making for distributed workloads across edge and cloud environments

These projects illustrate how Research@Eclipse translates early-stage innovation into reusable, open technologies, bridging the gap between exploration and real-world adoption.

Emerging technology domains

Research@Eclipse continues to expand into strategic and future-facing domains. New initiatives launched in 2025, such as Rigoletto, focused on next-generation RISC-V-based automotive hardware, and SecQDevOps, addressing secure development in quantum computing, highlight the breadth of collaboration across hardware, security, and advanced computing.