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.