Work on GNU Fortran is still being done mostly by its author,
James Craig Burley (burley@gnu.ai.mit.edu
), who is a volunteer
for, not an employee of, the Free Software Foundation (FSF).
As with other GNU software, funding is important because it can pay for
needed equipment, personnel, and so on.
The FSF provides information on the best way to fund ongoing
development of GNU software (such as GNU Fortran) in documents
such as the "GNUS Bulletin".
Email gnu@prep.ai.mit.edu
for information on funding the FSF.
To fund specific GNU Fortran work in particular, the FSF might provide a means for that, but the FSF does not provide direct funding to the author of GNU Fortran to continue his work. The FSF has employee salary restrictions that can be incompatible with the financial needs of some volunteers, who therefore choose to remain volunteers and thus be able to be free to do contract work and otherwise make their own schedules for doing GNU work.
Still, funding the FSF at least indirectly benefits work on specific projects like GNU Fortran because it ensures the continuing operation of the FSF offices, their workstations, their network connections, and so on, which are invaluable to volunteers. (Similarly, hiring Cygnus Support can help a project like GNU Fortran--Cygnus has been a long-time donor of equipment usage to the author of GNU Fortran, and this too has been invaluable---See section Contributors to GNU Fortran.)
Currently, the only way to directly fund the author of GNU Fortran
in his work on that project is to hire him for the work you want
him to do, or donate money to him.
Several people have done this
already, with the result that he has not needed to immediately find
contract work on a few occasions.
If more people did this, he
would be able to plan on not doing contract work for many months and
could thus devote that time to work on projects (such as the planned
changes for g77-0.6
) that require longer timeframes to complete.
For the latest information on the status of the author, do
`finger -l burley@gnu.ai.mit.edu', i.e. access burley
's
.plan
file just as you would fortran
's to get g77
status (except there's no public ftp
access to burley
's
.plan
file--you can email him asking for it).
Another important way to support work on GNU Fortran is to volunteer
to help out.
Work is needed on documentation, testing, porting
to various machines, and in some cases, coding (although major
changes planned for version 0.6 make it difficult to add manpower to this
area).
Email fortran@gnu.ai.mit.edu
to volunteer for this work.
See section Funding Free Software, for more information.
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