OpenLint now has a home. Open Source Europe has approved our application, and OpenLint is a hosted collective at opencollective.com/openlint.
What a fiscal host does
OpenLint is a community, not a company. A fiscal host is the legal entity that holds and accounts for money on a project’s behalf, so a community can take sponsorships and grants, pay contributors and cover costs without forming an organization of its own. Everything runs through Open Collective, so every contribution and every expense is public.
Why Open Source Europe
We looked at the Linux Foundation and the OpenAPI Initiative as well, and the community favored Open Source Europe, for three reasons:
- The people and the demand are in Europe. Most of the people doing the governance work are based there. Much of the demand comes from European public institutions that use API linting to enforce national API design rules, and they need a standard no single vendor controls.
- A neutral home. We wanted a host that can hold the project’s name and its intellectual property, and act as a neutral fiscal host for everyone who contributes.
- Sovereign infrastructure. It fits the push for open source infrastructure that’s governed in Europe, in the open.
Why this matters for OpenLint
Spectral’s ruleset format became a de facto standard. Governments, banks and companies publish their API design rules as Spectral rulesets, and other tools import them. But the format was never specified, and its future depended on one vendor’s priorities. OpenLint is turning that work into a shared, vendor-neutral standard: a specification with a conformance suite, a toolbox carried over from Spectral under Apache 2.0, and a community that works in the open.
A standard needs a home that isn’t any one vendor. Now it has one.
How the money will be used
Open Collective lets us do what we said we would when we applied:
- Pay maintainers for the work that keeps the toolbox healthy: releases, reviews, security and the supply chain.
- Facilitate the community: the weekly office hours, recordings and transcripts, and the work that moves from discussion to issue to pull request.
- Fund the specification: we’re preparing grant proposals, starting with the Sovereign Tech Fund for the specification and its conformance suite.
API Evangelist is the first sponsor. Everything we receive and spend shows up on the collective’s page, and we post updates there as the work moves.
Support OpenLint
If your organization runs API linting in its pipelines, or publishes its API design rules as rulesets, please consider sponsoring OpenLint on Open Collective. It goes straight to the people doing the work.
You can also help without money: try the migration from Spectral, join us at office hours on Thursdays, or bring your questions to Discussions.
Thank you to Open Source Europe for welcoming us.