Interesting... For some reason I had always assumed that Bootstrap was associated more closely with Twitter because it had the word "twitter" in the name.
Now I understand why some business are so concerned with preventing other websites and people from using their name. I'm not saying that Twitter should have demanded that these guys change the name of their framework to something else, but this is a good object lesson of how using someone other company's name can cause confusion.
In retrospect probably one of the biggest things that motivated me to investigate Bootstrap was because it had Twitter in the name, and I had the mindset "If Twitter uses it, then it must be good."
So I'm surprised to find out that it wasn't actually that deeply tied to Twitter.
Edit: I went back to the website for Bootstrap and the website clearly says:
Built at Twitter by @mdo and @fat,
versus here @fat is saying:
it isn’t actually maintained by a team at Twitter (nor was it ever).
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.
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.
(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.
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:
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.
Now I understand why some business are so concerned with preventing other websites and people from using their name. I'm not saying that Twitter should have demanded that these guys change the name of their framework to something else, but this is a good object lesson of how using someone other company's name can cause confusion.
In retrospect probably one of the biggest things that motivated me to investigate Bootstrap was because it had Twitter in the name, and I had the mindset "If Twitter uses it, then it must be good."
So I'm surprised to find out that it wasn't actually that deeply tied to Twitter.
Edit: I went back to the website for Bootstrap and the website clearly says:
Built at Twitter by @mdo and @fat,
versus here @fat is saying:
it isn’t actually maintained by a team at Twitter (nor was it ever).
So now I'm actually more confused.