[fat]

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.

[NathanKP]

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.

[fizx]

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.

[cpeterso]

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?

[fat]

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.

[DannyBee]

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.

[RobAley]

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.

[caniszczyk]

The latter is what we are going with.

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

[sharkweek]

(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.

[fat]

aww <3

[cryowaffle]

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.

[willholloway]

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

[Domenic_S]

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

[novamantis]

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

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

[Killswitch]

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

[kibwen]

  > 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.

[caniszczyk]

See this issue for more information:

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

[kibwen]

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.