The Eclipse Foundation this week revealed that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is providing funds needed to strengthen the reliability, performance and security of the infrastructure used to make the Open VSX Registry, an online marketplace for Visual Studio Code extensions.
Like other AI coding tools, the Kiro tool developed by AWS relies heavily on Visual Studio Code extensions that the Eclipse Foundation makes available under an open source license.
Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, said that as these tools have become used more widely, the stress on the underlying infrastructure used to host Open VSX Registry has significantly increased. The registry now hosts more than 7,000 extensions from nearly 5,000 publishers, with downloads exceeding more than 110 million per month but is only supported by three engineers.
The Eclipse Foundation has not agreed to migrate Open VSX Registry to the AWS cloud in return for this investment, but might as part of an effort to reduce costs. AWS, however, is providing infrastructure and services that will improve availability, performance and scalability across the systems currently used to host the registry, along with future initiatives planned by the Eclipse Foundation.
Nor is the AWS investment a direct result of an open letter that several open source foundations recently published concerning the economic viability of providing services such as Open VSX Registry, the need for additional sources of funding remains, said Milinkovich.
At the core of the issue is the simple fact that the vendors and non-profit entities that originally launched and support open source projects that are consumed as a service are shouldering the cost of maintaining the underlying IT infrastructure required with no way to recoup that investment. The overwhelming majority of large-scale users, including commercial entities that extract economic value, consume these services without contributing to their financial sustainability.
Rectifying the economic imbalance is going to require commercial and institutional partnerships that help fund infrastructure in ways that are aligned to usage and/or adoption of tiered access models through which fees might be levied on organizations that consume large amounts of IT infrastructure resources.
The open letter is the first step toward raising awareness of an issue that will eventually need to be addressed, for example, by throttling and rate limiting to moderate usage of package managers that were never supposed to become critical elements of a software development process. The hope is that individual developers that rely on those services will become more judicious about how they are incorporated into software development workflows.
It’s not precisely clear how much is being spent on IT infrastructure to support these projects but costs are in the tens of millions with no sign of abatement. In effect, open source projects are becoming economic victims of their own success. The issue now is determining how best to fund these projects in a way that is more sustainable with the aid of more financial resources that will, hopefully, soon be more forthcoming.
