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Comment by cpeterso | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

(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

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 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.

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

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

  > 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.

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