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Bootstrap Maintainers Leave Twitter

blog.getbootstrap.com

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Re: Bootstrap Maintainers Leave Twitter

#2

Post by andrewljohnson »

Just speculating here, but this doesn't exactly sound like it was blessed by Twitter: "Bootstrap will remain a Twitter project on GitHub for the time being, but we've realized the project has grown beyond us and the Twitter brand."

If this was something Twitter believed too, I imagine there would be some fanfare around this, Twitter helping FLOSS and all that.

More to this story?

Re: Bootstrap Maintainers Leave Twitter

#4

Post by jpadvo »

This is great -- an open source project started within a company, then spun off into its own independent entity. It's really great to see that.

Major kudos to the team and to Twitter for having the generosity to acknowledge a responsibility to the community that extends past their ownership of the project they've created. Thanks. :)

Re: Bootstrap Maintainers Leave Twitter

#5

Post by k-mcgrady »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #2

Just speculating here, but this doesn't exactly sound like it was blessed by Twitter: "Bootstrap will remain a Twitter project on GitHub for the time being, but we've realized the project has grown beyond us and the Twitter brand." If this was something Twitter believed too, I imagine there would be some fanfare around this, Twitter helping FLOSS and all that. More to this story?

It sounds to me like the two guys left twitter and have decided to continue work on bootstrap. Being open source is there a reason they can't? I don't know much regarding the rules of open source but is it possible they could just fork it and continue where they left off (without twitters blessing)?

Re: Bootstrap Maintainers Leave Twitter

#9

Post by pyre »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #5
andrewljohnson wrote: post #2

Just speculating here, but this doesn't exactly sound like it was blessed by Twitter: "Bootstrap will remain a Twitter project on GitHub for the time being, but we've realized the project has grown beyond us and the Twitter brand." If this was something Twitter believed too, I imagine there would be some fanfare around this, Twitter helping FLOSS and all that. More to this story?

It sounds to me like the two guys left twitter and have decided to continue work on bootstrap. Being open source is there a reason they can't? I don't know much regarding the rules of open source but is it possible they could just fork it and continue where they left off (without twitters blessing)?

This is true, but I imagine that they couldn't keep the Bootstrap name, though that's up to Twitter if they want to force the devs out of Bootstrap development and 'defend their mark.'

Re: Bootstrap Maintainers Leave Twitter

#10

Post by _rknLA »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #2

Just speculating here, but this doesn't exactly sound like it was blessed by Twitter: "Bootstrap will remain a Twitter project on GitHub for the time being, but we've realized the project has grown beyond us and the Twitter brand." If this was something Twitter believed too, I imagine there would be some fanfare around this, Twitter helping FLOSS and all that. More to this story?

You have to take a pragmatic perspective here as well. I'd wager that the only reason Bootstrap is a Twitter project to begin with is because of the assignment clause of most employment agreements: If you develop something at a company, the company owns it.

I can't imagine any managers at Twitter were sitting there thinking "Hey, I have this great idea that will make us boatloads of money! Let's release an open-source html/css/js framework that makes it super easy for anyone to make a site that looks like Twitter."

In all likelihood, it was a project that the developers wrote for internal ops and later attempted (and succeeded) to open source. If you look at the Impact Graph on github (https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/graphs/impact), you can see that it's pretty much Jacob and Mark's project.

From Twitter's perspective, they can either let Jacob and Mark continue to run with it at no real cost to themselves (since it's open source and they can still use Bootstrap), or they can try to find someone within the organization to continue to maintain it, which has a very real cost -- developer time. Given that they may not find someone to fill that role and that forcing someone into it would probably be bad for the project, I think the decision makes a lot of sense for Twitter.

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