Bootstrap is a free front end framework used for creating websites and web applications. It contains HTML and CSS-based design templates for typography, forms, buttons, navigation and other interface components, as well as optional JavaScript extensions. It now becomes a very popular front end frameworks for web designers. This framework was developed by Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton at Twitter. Later this framework was open sourced and hosted on GitHub and it now becomes one of the most popular projects on GitHub.
Some people may be curious about why Bootstrap is open sourced. One of the creators Mark Otto offers us an answer. The main reason to open source Bootstrap is he wants to make awesome people make awesome shit.
It started off as a resource to help make better looking and more usable internal tools at Twitter, Later along the development process, they realized others could use this to do cool things as well. Since Twitter is a huge proponent of open source tools, they wanted to give back to the community with this one. Lots of engineers pushed Mark to open source it from the very beginning. According to Mark, the only reason it finally got released when it did was from the help of Jacob who pushed him super hard on it.
Mark also said they developed this with their spare time such as at night or weekends.
We may find the true motivation behind open source from this story. When we benefit from open source projects, we should contribute as well to make others benefit from them. Hope this story can encourage more people contribute to the open source community.
