Mark and I built bootstrap while we were employed at twitter on twitter hardware. Also, undeniably it was largely influenced by our work there (and later would largely influence a lot of the code at twitter as well as power lots of projects both internally and publicly) – but it was never a company mandated project. It was something that Mark and I came up with on our own and pursued outside of work hours.

Okay thanks... I understand now. You started the project at Twitter, but it wasn't owned by Twitter. I'm glad that Twitter didn't claim Bootstrap as company owned code, because I and thousands of other people have really enjoyed using it in our projects.

One of the reasons I worked at twitter is that they want you to open-source virtually everything. They weren't likely to put up a fuss, and everyone was really proud of bootstrap.

I think most people would imagine a project called "Twitter Bootstrap" that was developed by people "employed at twitter on twitter hardware" would be property of Twitter. Does Twitter own the copyright?

right now it's under the Apache License v2 – but we're working to move it to MIT for 3.0.0

I think of the community as owning bootstrap at this point… maybe that's cheesy? Or naive…

I also think twitter played a larger roll than just hardware. Mark and I were both deeply embedded into the twitter culture (with access to great resources and really smart engineers to bounce ideas off of) and i think bootstrap has a very "twittery" feel as a result.

If you have no contributor agreements/licenses, how do you plan on moving it to MIT?

From what I see, the best you have is: "By contributing your code, you agree to license your contribution under the terms of the APLv2: https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/blob/master/LICENSE

(which isn't really that helpful)

Speaking as an corporate IP/open source lawyer, doing this wrong can hurt you very badly in the long run.

At a guess, the "working to move it" sentence probably implies that they are trying to get those agreements retrospectively, or re-writing any code that was contributed where they can't. As I understand it, the majority of code was written by themselves, so it shouldn't be too much of a task. Openstreetmap similarly moved licenses recently, they gained agreements where they could and dumped or re-mapped data where they couldn't.

If they aren't planning to do this, then I don't know what the "working to move it" means as it would simply be a 5 minute job to changing the license text.

The latter is what we are going with.

Follow this issue if you're interested in it: https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/issues/2054

(speaking of cheesy) Those who just create awesome tools and release them into the ecosystem free of charge add immeasurable value to the community. I really want to thank you for how much easier you two have made my life with bootstrap on numerous occasions.

aww <3

I have used Bootstrap on 4 or so sites by now and its amazing how divs just get the fuck out of my way now and I can get real work done. Thank you.

Yes. Bootstrap's grid system saves the day, everyday.

Same here. I'd offer to buy you a beer, but I imagine you've got plenty of those offers already ;)

I bet he's swimming in beer donations that have filled his pool.

Also, thank you Fat for making my life so much easier.

I too would like to jump on this bandwagon of thanking you for Bootstrap. Cheers fat.

  > right now it's under the Apache License v2 – but we're
  > working to move it to MIT for 3.0.0

What's the impetus for this? Losing patent protection and gaining strict GPL2 compatibility seems like a strange decision.

See this issue for more information:

https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/issues/2054

Interesting, thanks. It looks as though you rejected the idea of dual-licensing. It's totally understandable that you'd want to avoid the hassle, although a dual MIT/ASL2 really does give you the maximum protection and flexibility. There's at least one big open-source project that's recently taken this exact route:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.rust.devel/2593/matc...

...though in their case they were moving from MIT to a dual MIT/ASL2.

Like all major tech companies, Twitter is in a talent recruitment battle. Having their name associated with Bootstrap can only be a good thing for them.

I think the message the blog post is conveying is that Bootstrap grew out of two developers wanting to build something, not out of a manager wanting to setup an internal project and assemblying a team being instructed to work on the project.

Seems like the first ingredient in building successful start-ups and useful tools. Beings a passion project filling a need helps too.

Sounds like "sponsored" would be a good word to describe the relationship

Or "endorsed".