Jeremy Ashkenas then proposed to make it open source as an example app so that people could learn from it too. I finally had a chance to contribute to open source (but I did not know it would be a significant contribution)
I'm just glad it's been picked up by so many frameworks along the way. I think this is in big part due to the fact that it had just the right amount of simplicity / complexity and is perhaps one of the most basic use case for a framework like that. The new "Hello World" first-timer experience.
I'm currently experimenting with Backbone.js but I find it a bit hard to adjust to MVC in the browser. Tutorials on the web are also not very helpful and most of them incomplete; but I'm not giving up :)
I've learned to mostly get the hang of it after repeated references to the official docs and the todo app. I think part of the difficulty is its lack of rigidity -- Backbone.js leaves quite a bit up to conventions, or the developer.
For the (historical) record, it was originally introduced by Nick Fitzgerald in this commit:
https://github.com/documentcloud/backbone/pull/29
... and then later styled up by Jérôme Gravel-Niquet.
