Kenzaburo Ito and a friend originally created a bug tracker
as an internal tool for their pet project. A search for good, free
packages came up with nothing suitable so they wrote their own.
After a rewrite and cleanup it was made available to the public via
the GNU General Public License (GPL). The GPL was chosen partly
because of his belief that development tools should be cheap or
free. In 2002, Ken was joined by Jeroen Latour, Victor Boctor and
Julian Fitzell to be the administrators and the core development
team of MantisBT. This marks a new era in MantisBT lifetime where it is
now a team project.