I find it ironic that the company that's created Bootstrap - an entire toolkit encouraging developers to adopt their site's visual style - is so opposed to any other aspect of following their lead.
It seems to me that if Twitter were able to offer their API freely to devs at zero cost to themselves, they would do so.
Twitter bootstrap, on the other hand, is something they built for themselves to reduce the friction of creating rich, consistent UIs. Developing it is a sunk cost. Offering it free to the world should cost them nothing as it's hosted on Github [1].
Like others in this thread, I lament that Twitter has become less egalitarian. Moving forward, developers with one idea of usage will have more Twitter clout than developers with "lesser" ideas, but Twitter has bills to pay and investors to answer to. It's far from an ideal world, but I can't offer them a better solution for their problems.
