Bootstrap separates from Twitter

Bootstrap was unveiled in August 2011, promising a toolkit that, according to designer Mark Otto, featured “a small footprint and a compelling visual design, which developers and designers can appreciate”. February 2012 saw the toolkit hit 2.0, which the team treated as a completely new framework, to “overhaul our documentation, rewrite nearly every component, and add some new features based on community feedback".

According to a post on the Bootstrap blog, the toolkit is now heading for another major change, since co-creators Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton are leaving Twitter, for, respectively, GitHub and Obvious. Both will continue to work on the project, but the blog post stated: “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. It's a huge project playing a pretty awesome role in the web development industry, and we're excited to see it continue to grow. To that end, we've begun working to move Bootstrap into its own open source organization. It will take time, but we're dedicated to making it happen.”

On his own blog, Otto iterated that this should benefit Bootstrap in the long run: “I want to once again reiterate that [Thornton] and I will continue to work on Bootstrap with a 2.1.2 release dropping in the coming weeks. Beyond that, we're working with [Chris Aniszczyk] at Twitter to move Bootstrap into its own organization on GitHub so we can build out a larger team of dedicated contributors to make Bootstrap even better.” Otto also added on Hacker News that the decision has “nothing to do with a disagreement about Bootstrap” and was instead driven by both Otto and Thornton wanting a change in their day-to-day lives.