The first Thursday session. OpenLint was ahead in the naming vote, with Spectacle and Sherpa behind it. Sherpa had drawn concerns about its connotations, and Miriam found that the bare openlint package on npm was already taken. I went through the roadmap priorities for the rules specification and the toolbox. The group added a test harness for custom rules, which platform teams need before they ship a rule to hundreds of teams. When Dimitri joined, I caught him up on why Open Source Europe, with Open Collective for funding, looked like the right home, and on the idea of launching at the Europe API day of API Days Paris.
OpenLint · Session 4 of 6
Name Votes, Testing Custom Rules and a European Home
September 3rd, 2026 · 0:27:49
Naming
Testing
Open Source Europe
API Days Paris
What we worked through
Where the vote stood
OpenLint was winning. It’s a literal name, which Frank had argued plays well with enterprises. Spectacle raised trademark worries because it’s close to Spectral, Sherpa had connotation concerns, and an old npm package already uses the name openlint.
Roadmap for the rules spec
Normative language, a conformance suite, tools for building rules and teaching people about them, federated rules modeled on how the German government shares OAuth scopes, formats beyond OpenAPI and AsyncAPI, aliases, modular rulesets, industry packages and custom rules.
Roadmap for the toolbox
Modular, no telemetry, a healthy supply chain, standard guidance for running in pipelines, support for commercial and open source use, and an easy migration path from Spectral.
Testing rules themselves
Testing custom Spectral rules today means copying config out of Spectral’s own repo and fiddling with it. A ready-made test harness would make rules safe to roll out across a platform. Conformance keeps tools aligned; testing keeps rules correct.
Why Open Source Europe
Most of the people governing this are European, and both the Dutch and German governments said sovereignty matters. Lukasz Gornicki’s account of AsyncAPI’s time with the Linux Foundation and Open Collective made the case for a home that can protect the IP and act as a European funding vehicle.