Contribute OkHttp, OkIo, Retrofit, and SqlDelight to Commonhaus #309
maniksurtani
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Joining Commonhaus
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Accepted. Welcome to Commonhaus! |
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Nice! Congratulations all, and @maniksurtani 💯 |
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Welcome aboard! |
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@tirsen FYI |
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Project information
There are 4 projects we want to contribute.
Do you have authority to represent this project?
Describe your project
OkHttp
OkHttp is Square's flagship HTTP client for the JVM, Android, and GraalVM, designed to be efficient by default and resilient when networks misbehave. It supports HTTP/2 with transparent socket sharing, connection pooling for HTTP/1.1, response caching, transparent GZIP, and a fluent builder API that handles both blocking and async calls without ceremony. Its TLS implementation tracks the modern ecosystem closely — TLS 1.3, ALPN, certificate pinning, with carefully-managed fallbacks for legacy connectivity — which is why it has become the de facto HTTP stack on Android and a baseline dependency across the JVM ecosystem. With roughly 47k stars, nearly 300 contributors, 6,200+ commits, and a 5.x release line that shipped throughout 2025, OkHttp is one of the most battle-tested and widely-deployed open source HTTP clients in production today.
Okio
Okio is a modern I/O library that complements java.io and java.nio, designed to make reading, writing, and processing data dramatically simpler and faster. It centers on two primitives: ByteString, an immutable byte sequence with built-in hex, Base64, and UTF-8 handling, and Buffer, a mutable queue-like sequence that grows on demand and removes the awkwardness of position/limit/capacity bookkeeping. Originally extracted from OkHttp, Okio has fully embraced Kotlin Multiplatform and now provides consistent file system and streaming abstractions across JVM, Android, Native (iOS, macOS, Linux, Windows), Node.js, and WASI. With approximately 8,800 dependent repositories on GitHub alone — and a presence as a transitive dependency in a substantial portion of Android and Kotlin Multiplatform applications — it serves as foundational infrastructure for an enormous slice of the modern JVM and KMP ecosystem.
Retrofit
Retrofit turns REST APIs into clean, type-safe Kotlin and Java interfaces: you describe an HTTP endpoint with annotations, and Retrofit generates the client. Built on top of OkHttp with pluggable converters for Gson, Moshi, kotlinx.serialization, Jackson, Protobuf, JAXB, and more, it has become the canonical way to integrate networked services on Android and a popular choice on the server-side JVM. The library's design has proven remarkably durable — the recently-released 3.x line maintains forward binary-compatibility with the 2.x line, so libraries compiled against 2.x continue to work without modification, a level of API stewardship that's rare in any ecosystem. With roughly 44k stars, 162 contributors, and over a decade of continuous evolution, Retrofit is among the most recognizable names in the JVM open source landscape.
SQLDelight
SQLDelight inverts the typical ORM relationship: instead of generating SQL from objects, it generates type-safe Kotlin APIs from your SQL. You write standard SQL — schema, queries, and migrations — and SQLDelight validates everything at compile time, producing strongly-typed query objects with full IDE support for autocomplete, refactoring, and navigation. It supports SQLite across Android, iOS, JVM, JavaScript, Native, and Multiplatform targets, and on the JVM also handles MySQL, PostgreSQL, and HSQL/H2. Its compile-time guarantees and first-class Kotlin Multiplatform support have made it the leading data-layer library for KMP applications, with around 6.8k stars, 179 contributors, and an actively-maintained 2.x release line that shipped its most recent version in November 2025.
Motivation for joining Commonhaus
These four projects share a common story: they grew up at Block (originally Square), but their communities, contributors, and real-world impact have long outgrown any single corporate sponsor. Together they form a foundational layer of the JVM and Kotlin networking and data stack — OkHttp and Okio sit at the bottom of nearly every Android networking dependency tree, Retrofit is the standard way Android applications consume HTTP services, and SQLDelight is the leading typed-SQL solution for Kotlin Multiplatform. The combined reach is substantial: roughly 106k GitHub stars across the four projects, billions of downloads through Maven Central and Docker, thousands of dependent open source repositories, and effective ubiquity inside the Android ecosystem. Their broad appeal cuts across mobile, backend, and tooling communities, and their maturity is well past any "experiment" phase — these are stable, conservatively-versioned libraries with multi-major-version histories and disciplined release cadences continuing into 2025.
The reason for moving is simple: we want to give these projects what they've effectively already become — independent, community-stewarded infrastructure with neutral governance. The majority of active maintainers no longer work at Block. They've moved on to a range of other companies but continue to maintain these libraries on their own time and through their new employers because they care about the code and the communities around it. That arrangement has worked, but it's fragile: corporate trademarks, a single-company CLA flow, and the optics of "a Square/Block library" create unnecessary friction for contributors, downstream adopters, and any future maintainer who joins without a Block affiliation. Commonhaus offers precisely the governance model these libraries need — lightweight, principled about neutrality and openness, and explicitly designed for projects with broad, cross-company contributor bases. Joining Commonhaus formalizes what is already true in practice, guarantees long-term continuity beyond any single employer, and removes friction for the users and contributors who already treat these libraries as shared community assets.
Things to review before submitting
Review the bylaws, especially sections about projects,
decision making,
and voting for significant decisions.
Review the Fiscal Sponsorship Terms and Conditions.
These outline the legal and financial framework for how we support projects.
If all is well, and you agree to move forward, then create a PR with the following:
Please include the footnote reference, as we are using your project name and logo with your permission until a formal agreement is in place and assets are transferred.
The commit should be "Signed-off-by" your GH login (
git commit -s -m "<project> joining request, yyyy-mm-dd")Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
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