Who We Are

FreeMarker 1 (Classic) was originally written by Benjamin Geer and Mike Bayer. They defined the basic syntax -- and more importantly, the philosophy -- of the tool that is carried on in FreeMarker 2. Significant contributions to FreeMarker Classic were made by Nicholas Cull, Holger Arendt and others.

In early 2002, Jonathan Revusky rewrote the core (parser/compiler) code using a popular parser generator tool, JavaCC. This was really the basis of FreeMarker 2 (Lazarus), which, though largely backward compatible with FreeMarker 1 (Classic) is virtually a complete rewrite. He is an independent software developer and consultant, available in particular for work on java and open-source technologies. He can be reached by email via jon at revusky.com

Attila Szegedi has made significant contributions to the Lazarus release. Besides refactoring and optimizing some of the core API's for the Lazarus release, Attila is the main author of the date/time support, freemarker.ext.* packages responsible for JavaBeans, Jython, and XML mappings, as well as for HTTP servlet, JSP and Ant integration.

Dániel Dékány is the main author and maintainer of the documentation. Since 2011-05, he also does most of the maintenance work, new features, and the releases. Earlier, many features of FreeMarker were introduced or substantially improved based on his ideas. He is the author of FMPP, the tool that saves FreeMarker users from writing Java code when they just want to process some templates to generate corresponding output files.

Chris Nokleberg is a FreeMarker "power user" who makes life difficult for the other developers by requesting new features and using the BeansWrapper in horrifying ways. He attempts to redeem himself by occasionally fixing bugs and implementing such features himself.

Stephan Mueller is the author of the new FreeMarker plugin for the Eclipse IDE. Stephan studies computer science at the University of Technology in Aachen, Germany.

Many other ideas and feedback were provided by the various participants on the freemarker-devel and freemarker-user mailing lists. People who are interested in influencing (and even participating in) further FreeMarker development are strongly encouraged to subscribe...

By community consensus, FreeMarker 2 release is under the more liberal BSD-style license. (FreeMarker Classic was released under the LGPL.) Benjamin Geer, the main author of FreeMarker 1, remained the copyright holder of FreeMarker versions 2.0.x and 2.1.x. It was decided that, since we did not at that point have a juridical entity (such as the Apache Foundation) to play this role, that Benjamin Geer would continue to be the sole copyright holder. Though various people have contributed to FreeMarker development, to have one individual be copyright holder would make future license changes or clarifications simpler.

As of FreeMarker 2.2, the copyright holder of the FreeMarker codebase is the Visigoth Software Society, a non-profit association based in Spain, and co-founded by Jonathan Revusky in December of 2002. Benjamin Geer graciously agreed to cede the copyright to VSS on the understanding that it would remain available under a liberal open-source license. The terms of the license remain the same.