Less was created in 2009 by Alexis Sellier, more commonly known as @cloudhead. Originally written in Ruby, it was then ported to JavaScript.
Less was originally inspired by Sass, with a leaner feature set and a syntax closely matching CSS, which Sass did not have at the time. (Sass was later inspired by Less to create SCSS, its own CSS-like syntax.)
In May 2012 Alexis turned over control and development to a core team of contributors who now manage, fix and extend the language.
Core team
Less is maintained by a group of invaluable core contributors, with the massive support and involvement of our community. No one person is in charge and everyone has their own areas and donates the time they can afford. In alphabetical order:
Alexis Sellier Original Author, Language Design @cloudhead
Luke Page Releasing, Development, Language Design, Documentation @lukeapage
Marcus Bointon Color Functions @Synchro
Mária Jurčovičová Language Design, Java Port @sommeri
Matthew Dean Project Management, Releasing, Development, Language Design, Community @matthew-dean
Max Mikhailov Development, Documentation, Language Design @seven-phases-max
Lei Chen Development, Documentation, Language Design, Community @iChenLei
Get involved with Less development by opening an issue or submitting a pull request (if it's a feature request, please open an issue first).
Read our contributing guidelines and the developing section of our usage page.
Stay up to date on the development of Less and reach out to the community with these helpful resources.
- Have a feature request or bug report? Let us know on our GitHub Issues.
Have a question about less language or need a help with tricky use case? Here are some links worth visiting:
- ##lesscss channel on Freenode.
- Less Q&A at Stack Overflow.
Books
- Less Web Development Essentials, by Bass Jobsen, Foreword by Alexis Sellier
- Less Web Development Cookbook, by Bass Jobsen and Amin Meyghani, Foreword by Luke Page
- Less. Путеводитель для новичков, by Denis Malinochkin
Videos
- Learning Less, by Anthony Killeen
Community members have translated Less documentation into various languages.
Community submitted.
None of the translations are officially supported and may not always be up to date.
- Belarusian: http://www.designcontest.com/show/lesscss-be
- 中文 (Chinese): http://lesscss.cn
- Danish: http://lesscss.dk
- German: http://www.lesscss.de
- Indonesian: http://bertzzie.com/post/7/dokumentasi-less-bahasa-indonesia
- Iranian: http://lesscss-iran.ir
- Japanese: http://less-ja.studiomohawk.com/
- Polish: http://ciembor.github.com/lesscss.org/
- Portuguese: http://giovanneafonso.github.io/lesscss.org/
- Russian: http://less-lang.info
- Spanish: http://amatellanes.github.io/lesscss.org/
- Ukrainian: http://komaval.github.com/lesscss.org/
- Vietnamese: http://less.eten.vn/
Have another language to add, or perhaps a different or better translation? Let us know by opening an issue.
Less.js is released under the Apache 2 License (though there are plans to dual license it). Copyright 2009-2023, Alexis Sellier and the Less Core Team (see about). Boiled down to smaller chunks, it can be described with the following conditions.
It allows you to:
- Freely download and use Less.js, in whole or in part, for personal, company internal or commercial purposes
- Use Less.js in packages or distributions that you create
It forbids you to:
- Redistribute any piece of Less.js without proper attribution
It requires you to:
- Include a copy of the license in any redistribution you may make that includes Less.js
- Provide clear attribution to The Less Core Team for any distributions that include Less.js
It does not require you to:
- Include the source of Less.js itself, or of any modifications you may have made to it, in any redistribution you may assemble that includes it
- Submit changes that you make to Less.js back to the Less.js project (though such feedback is encouraged)
The full Less.js license is located in the project repository for more information.