A short piece of fiction, written by API Evangelist. The reader is imagined; the post, and every number and quotation from it, is real: "The Dutch Government Now Runs On OpenLint," Kin Lane, November 5, 2026, https://apievangelist.com/2026/11/05/the-dutch-government-now-runs-on-openlint/
Anouk read the post on a Thursday afternoon, between a failed pipeline and a meeting she didn't want to go to. She builds the CI tooling for a small team that publishes APIs for a municipal service. Her pipeline still ran Spectral, pinned to a version nobody on the team had touched since the summer.
She remembered the summer. The supply chain scare had made her pin the version, and then the issue sat unanswered. She had assumed that if the Dutch government's design rules were written as Spectral rulesets, someone with more authority than her team would eventually sort it out. Reading the post, she saw that this was what had happened, though not the way she'd pictured.
Kin Lane opens by saying that when he forked Spectral, "the first downstream user I pointed at was the Dutch government." Anouk read that line twice. It was odd to see how small the start had been: one person's fork under API Commons, with a standard sitting underneath it. Then he gave the credit away. Others cloned it, cleaned it up and stripped the telemetry, and the team at developer.overheid.nl turned the ruleset format into its own specification.
That part she liked. For years the format had been whatever the linter happened to accept. Now there was a document with MUST and SHOULD in it. She read Kin's line about it, "The specification is now separate from the tool", and thought it was the first sentence in the whole saga that made her feel safer.
The rest made her less comfortable. A fork had become a project in a few months, and she wasn't sure how much to trust that. Kin himself says "A fork is not a standard," which she took as a fair warning against getting excited. The new home at Open Source Europe was only a plan, and the official launch was still weeks away, on December 3. She also noticed that the post, in its translated half, admitted the VS Code plugin had not worked well for a long time. Half her team lived in that editor. Nothing here fixed it yet.
The vacuum section annoyed her most, because she had hoped it was the easy exit. The Dutch authors said it doesn't fully support the ruleset format and that differences remain. Kin hopes for a world where "a ruleset gives the same result whichever linter you run." Anouk wanted that world too. She also knew a hope isn't a migration plan.
What decided her was how little it asked of her. Rulesets work without changes. The CLI still picks up an existing .spectral.yaml. Version 1.0 is on npm. Nothing in the post told her to rip anything out.
So she did the least she could defend. She didn't touch the main pipeline. She opened a branch, swapped the dev dependency to openlint, changed the command in one script, and ran it against a single openapi.yaml that she already knew produced eleven warnings. Then she saved the old output beside the new, so she could compare them line by line in the morning.
She skipped the meeting notes and kept the diff open instead.