aligajani said:

I come from a CI background so I can't understand why would the Laravel Framework ship with a vendor folder which has sub folder for each of the major Laravel code contributors, namely ircmaxell, nesbot and more. What is the perfect barebones structure for me to use Laravel, so I can simply delete the junk I don't need.

If you follow the quickstart directions in the Laravel docs is the best way. (http://laravel.com/docs/quick) The contents of the vendor directory will have everything required to run Laravel and is already in a barebones state.

Hello aligajani,

the vendor folder is actually required by any modern framework in the PHP world. You should check out https://getcomposer.org/ website to understand why (as well as the laravel documentation as mentionned above).

The folders insides are not major contributors to the project, but open source librairies used by Laravel but not directly linked to it. You can find a lot more informations for them on https://packagist.org/