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's developer portal now runs on OpenLint," Kin Lane, November 4, 2026, https://openlint.org/blog/2026/11/04/dutch-government-moves-to-openlint/
Marit maintains the build tooling at a small software company, and she read the post on Wednesday morning with her coffee going cold. She had the Spectral setup open in another tab, because the repository she looked after still had a pinned version she hadn't touched since summer.
The first thing she noticed was who was talking. This was the OpenLint blog, so of course it was pleased with itself. A government portal had moved over, and the headline said so. She read the headline as a sales pitch and then made herself read the body, which was less glossy than the title. The Dutch team had pinned Spectral and looked at vacuum before moving, and they described their reasons in some detail. One of those reasons she recognised from her own backlog: hundreds of issues were already open and bugs in the VS Code plugin had gone unaddressed for a long time. She had stopped filing issues against that plugin a year ago.
She was less comfortable with the claim that the ruleset format, as it stood, had only ever been whatever the linter accepted. That described her own team's rules exactly. Nobody had written down what the rules meant. They worked because the tool tolerated them. The post's answer was a proper specification, and one sentence stuck with her: that separates the specification from the toolbox, so any linter can implement the format, and OpenLint is one of them. She liked it more than she wanted to. A format that outlived a single tool was what she had been missing without having a name for it.
Still, she didn't trust a friendly tone from the people selling the thing. Version 1.0 was recent. The language server, which was what her colleagues cared about, sat in the post's list of what comes next, not in the list of what exists. If she moved the repository over and the editor experience was worse for a quarter, she would be the one answering for it. She also noticed that the rulesets the post said ran unchanged were the Dutch team's rulesets, not hers. Hers had odd regular expressions in them.
What kept her from closing the tab was the migration section, which was shorter than she expected. Your rulesets don’t need converting, and her old config file would still be picked up. It was two lines in the shell, swapping one package for another and one command for another. That was a small enough thing to try without asking anyone.
The post said you don’t have to wait, and she took that as permission to try, not as a reason to commit. She didn't open a ticket or write a proposal. She made a branch called openlint-trial, installed the package as a dev dependency, and left the Spectral entry exactly where it was.
Then she ran the new lint command against the one OpenAPI file that had the most rules attached to it, saved the output next to the old output, and set the two side by side to see whether they agreed. If they didn't, she would at least know where.