Authors of R. R was initially written by Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka of the Statistics Department of the University of Auckland. Since mid-1997 there has been a core group with write access to the R source, currently consisting of Douglas Bates John Chambers Peter Dalgaard Seth Falcon Robert Gentleman Kurt Hornik Stefano Iacus Ross Ihaka Friedrich Leisch Thomas Lumley Martin Maechler Duncan Murdoch Paul Murrell Martyn Plummer Brian Ripley Deepayan Sarkar Duncan Temple Lang Luke Tierney Simon Urbanek plus Heiner Schwarte up to October 1999 and Guido Masarotto up to June 2003.