The lysine contingency

17 June 2026

I'm happy to announce that Retrofit, OkHttp, and Okio are moving to a new GitHub organization, and along with SQL Delight are all joining the Commonhaus Foundation. You can read their announcement of the move.

This move is meant to reinforce our commitment to these projects' longevity and honor the fact that they've long since outgrown the stewardship of a single company. The transfer these projects is already underway! Assets and infrastructure are still being moved, so please bear with us as we get everything back up and running.

On behalf of myself, Jesse Wilson, and Alec Kazakova, thank you to everyone at Square, Cash App, and externally who contributed to these projects over the years. We look forward to continuing to work with you at their new home at lysine.dev.

So what's with the name and "the lysine contingency"? Well…

I first met Jesse Wilson in 2012 when Bob Lee invited me to a live-action recreation of Jurassic Park which they were going to see. It was certainly an experience.

We became coworkers at Square that year. Thirteen years later, in November of last year, Jesse and I got to quit on the same day.

Part of leaving was our commitment to maintain some of the more notable open source projects we built. We assumed the company would continue its stewardship in good faith. It did not.

The "lysine contingency" is a plan in Jurassic Park for if the dinosaurs were to escape to limit the amount of damage they could do. Ours is a plan to limit the amount of damage our old company can do.

These projects are now free to live and thrive on their own. And maybe some of the others can join them, in time.

— Jake Wharton