A bigger group, and the two questions everything else waited on: what to call the fork and where it should live. Phil suggested Beacon, someone suggested Sherpa, and "Open API linter" turned into OpenLint. I committed to a public vote. On the home, we compared the OpenAPI Initiative, the Linux Foundation and Open Source Europe, and Joost explained why the Dutch government needs something that isn't only about OpenAPI. Then we got into how much tooling the group should own, managing many rulesets across environments, promoting aliases into the core, the dependencies still sitting under Stoplight, and working inside the Overlays and Arazzo communities instead of starting new channels.
OpenLint · Session 3 of 6
Finding a Name and a Home for the Spectral Fork
August 28th, 2026 · 0:52:02
Spectral
Naming
Open Source Europe
Aliases
Rulesets
What we worked through
The name
Phil wanted a name that shows what good looks like rather than scolding people, like Beacon. Frank suggested either a very literal name or a new brand to build community around. The candidates went into a GitHub issue for a two-week vote.
The home
The name comes first, then a GitHub org and repo, then an Open Collective. Frank ranked the Linux Foundation third. Joost stressed that the Dutch government uses these rules for JSON-FG and more, not just OpenAPI, and that a European home would help given the geopolitics.
How much tooling
The consensus was one org with separate repos: reference tooling and composable core libraries, so vendors like Speakeasy build on shared code instead of writing their own linters. Mike is most interested in the spec, Jakub in the tooling, and I want to be the connective tissue.
Rulesets at scale
One customer has about 160 custom rules and needs different rulesets for the IDE, the pipeline and production. Joost’s team built a layer on top of Spectral to manage rulesets per standard and version. Modular rulesets belong in the spec.
Aliases
Phil explained that aliases only work inside the Spectral OpenAPI ruleset today. Mike pointed to semantic aliases being discussed for Overlays, since schemas can appear in a dozen places in a document. Aliases went to the top of the roadmap.
Dependencies and staying open
Jakub raised the libraries still under the Stoplight org. Frank’s position: anything foundational has to be in the open and maintained. Phil, who owns the upstream json-schema-ref-parser, wants to upstream fixes rather than maintain forks.