My primary debt is to Professor Ramu Ramanathan of the University of California, San Diego. A few years back he was kind enough to provide me with the source code for his program ESL ("Econometrics Software Library"), which I ported to Linux, and since then I have collaborated with him on updating and extending the program. For the gretl project I have made extensive changes to the original ESL code. New econometric functionality has been added, and the graphical interface is entirely new. Please note that Professor Ramanathan is not responsible for any bugs in gretl.
I am grateful to the authors of several econometrics textbooks for permission to package for gretl various datasets associated with their texts. This list currently includes William Greene, author of Econometric Analysis; Jeffrey Wooldridge (Introductory Econometrics: A Modern Approach); James Stock and Mark Watson (Introduction to Econometrics); Damodar Gujarati (Basic Econometrics); and Russell Davidson and James MacKinnon (Econometric Theory and Methods).
GARCH estimation in gretl is based on code deposited in the archive of the Journal of Applied Econometrics by Professors Fiorentini, Calzolari and Panattoni, and the code to generate p-values for Dickey Fuller tests is due to James MacKinnon. In each case I am grateful to the authors for permission to use their work.
With regard to the internationalization of gretl, I wish to thank Ignacio Díaz-Emparanza, Michel Robitaille, Cristian Rigamonti and Tadeusz Kufel, who prepared the Spanish, French, Italian and Polish translations respectively.
I have benefitted greatly from the work of numerous developers of open-source software: for specifics please see Appendix B to this manual. My thanks are due to Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation, for his support of free software in general and for agreeing to "adopt" gretl as a GNU program in particular.
Many users of gretl have submitted useful suggestions and bug reports. In this connection particular thanks are due to Ignacio Díaz-Emparanza, Tadeusz Kufel, Pawel Kufel, Alan Isaac, Cri Rigamonti and Dirk Eddelbuettel, who maintains the gretl package for Debian GNU/Linux. Besides making good suggestions, Riccardo "Jack" Lucchetti has contributed substantial code and econometric expertise.