<chapter id="acknowledgments"><title>Acknowledgments</title>

<para>
The Vis5D project has benefited over the years from the contributions
of countless organizations and individuals.  We would like to express our
sincere gratitude to all of them, but we'll have to make do with
mentioning those few whose help has been recorded in the sparse logs.
</para>

<para>
First on any list, of course, must be the authors of the original
Vis5D: Bill Hibbard, Johan Kellum, and Brian Paul.  They and their
generous sponsor, the University of Wisconsin-Madison's <ulink
url="http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/">Space Science and Engineering
Center</ulink> (SSEC), made this considerable project a reality long
before "open source" was in vogue.
</para>

<para>
Other contributors to Vis5D include Andre Battaiola of CPTEC (Sao
Paolo, Brazil), Dave Santek of SSEC, Marie-Francoise Voidrot-Martinez
of the French Meteorology Office, Dave Kamins and Jeff Vroom of
Stellar Computer Inc., Simon Baas and Hans de Jong of the Netherlands
for the HP/VOGL port, Pratish Shah of Kubota Computer for the Kubota
port, and Mike Stroyan of HP for the PEX support.
</para>

<para>
The Vis5d+ project has been aided by the efforts of Axel Reimann of
Humboldt Univ. (who converted the manual to DocBook), Jim Edwards
(many API cleanups, etc.), and Conrad Poelman of Stellar Science
Ltd. Co. (improved v5dimport, etc.).  Jim Edwards would like to thank
<ulink url="http://www.inmet.gov.br/">Instituto Nacional de
Meteorologia Brasil</ulink> (INMET) for its support of his work on
Vis5d+.
</para>

<para>
Steven G. Johnson of <ulink url="http://web.mit.edu/">MIT</ulink>
would also like to extend a special thanks to his physics advisor,
Prof. John Joannopoulos, for unstinting encouragement despite his
student's dubious pastimes.  Steven's work was supported in part by
the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center program of the
National Science Foundation under Grant No. DMR-9400334.
</para>

<para>
Finally, this project, like so many others, is deeply indebted to the
free software community and especially the <ulink
url="http://www.gnu.org/">GNU project</ulink> for many invaluable
tools and libraries, a free operating system to run them on, and
inspiration not least of all.  And <ulink
url="http://www.valinux.com/">VA Linux</ulink> deserves the last
mention for graciously providing us with hosting on <ulink
url="http://www.sourceforge.net/">SourceForge</ulink>, a service that
we highly recommend.
</para>

</chapter>
