In July 2026 I forked Spectral, the API linter that the Dutch and German governments have mandated and that IBM, SAP and plenty of others had quietly forked on their own, because nobody trusted that it had a roadmap. I didn't want another private fork. I wanted a community one. Over the summer a group of us met every week to work out what that meant.
These are those conversations, in order. We started with a roadmap and a placeholder name, Spotlight. From there we argued through the line between the specification and the tooling, the conformance suite, aliases and JSONPath, how rulesets should be modular, and where a project like this should live. After a public vote and trademark checks, we settled on the name OpenLint on September 17th.
This page is the record of how we got there, kept here on API Evangelist. From here on, OpenLint's work and its videos live with the project.
