Hey Bryan, good to hear from you again. It's been roughly two years since we even spoke to each other, let alone saw each other in public. Before I dive into it, I have always and will continue to always have nothing but the best wishes for ZURB. Now, to get to it.
You did teach me a lot, Bryan, and I know the (edit: removed the number) ex-ZURBians would agree with you on that. You taught me about design process, design thinking, and how to communicate well with clients and other designers. Moreover, if you hadn't brought me out to California, I wouldn't be where I am today. Thanks again for that, I really do owe you one there. You taught us a lot more, but we don't need to go into that as I'm sure everything that drove us away has changed for the better.
Yes, Bootstrap emerged from my work at ZURB, but more importantly, from the entire web community. Before I redesigned ZURB.com or wrote nearly the entire ZURB Style Guide (at least the CSS and Design Patterns sections), frameworks and style guides were already in high demand and influencing our work at ZURB. You can take a look at the CSS section here: http://d.pr/i/uoGb. I have screenshots of every page of the project from right before I left.
It's important to note that I never worked on Foundation, nor had any idea it was in the works until it was released on 10/14/2011, two months after Bootstrap was released (https://twitter.com/ZURB/status/124984359135608832). In fact, it was Dave Gamache, former ZURB designer and now former Twitter designer, who wrote a majority of Foundation 1.0 after I left ZURB. Go ahead and ask him (@dhg) about that for more details.
However, I did copy and paste code, but never from Foundation. The things Bryan is referring to are "how to" docs, lorem ipsum and filler text, and examples for the address tag, emphasis tags, lists, and blockquotes. Looking at the very first commit to Bootstrap (https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/tree/eb81782cdbdc68aaeb...), four months before we released v1.0, you can see that content there. I have made no attempt to hide it, nor could I. In the hundreds of following commits, I removed nearly all that code before launching BS1.0, but I missed some (the items listed above). Within days, I removed it and replaced it with my own code, copy, and examples. Edit: for full transparency, you can see Bootstrap 1.0 and the offending content at http://d.pr/i/Rn9r.
I made an honest mistake that any developer can by using code from the work I did at my previous employer, but I also fully rectified it immediately by removing all the offending code and replacing it with my own.
I made a mistake early on by using the work I had done at ZURB as a basis for everything I have done since then. In the theoretical sense, that is never frowned upon, but in the practical, it is, and I'm sorry about that. But I never ripped Foundation, nor ever intend to. If anything, you need to take a fresh look at Foundation 3 and ask yourself who's really taking code from the other's framework. (edit for clarification).
Ever since Bootstrap 2.0 came out, you've ripped nearly every single component we created in our framework and added it to Foundation, including: the basics of our grid system, navbar, responsive navbar, breadcrums, alerts, labels, tooltips, popovers, prepended and appended inputs, breadcrumbs, accordion, progress bars, image styles, and more. All of those were in Bootstrap first, and you've added them without even batting an eye. We've also added things that other frameworks and products added, but when you're calling me out for ripping something I never had access to, you really need to take a step back and look at what you've done as well.
I have no illusions about how I got to where I am: I thank everyone profusely, day in and day out, for making it possible. I made the mistake of using the work I did at ZURB to start a brand new project, and I apologize for doing it that way and corrected the mistake within days. I never stole from Foundation, nor do I ever plan to.