The author and project leader of Kawa is Per Bothner per@bothner.com.
Kawa is a re-write of Kawa 0.2, which was a Scheme interpreter written by R. Alexander Milowski alex@milowski.com.
Thanks to Cygnus Solutions (now part of Red Hat) for sponsoring the initial development of Kawa, and then transferring their ownership interest to Per.
Ean Schuessler and Brainfood provided financial support and encouragement.
Thanks to Chris Dean, Dean Ferreyra, and others at Merced Systems for financial support and other contributions.
Google through their Summer of Code project sponsored Charles Turner during Summer 2011 and 2012, Andrea Bernardini Summer 2014 and 2015, and Tom Bousso Summer 2017.
Thomas Kirk and AT&T provided financial support, and useful bug reports.
Jakub Jankiewicz contributed the Kawa logo.
Helmut Eller provided SLIME support, syntaxutils.scm, and many bug reports.
Daniel Bonniot for multiple small improvements to gnu.bytecode and gnu.expr.
Jamison Hope for multiple contributions, including quaternion support, the SRFI-14 implementation, Ant improvements, and Google Summer of Code mentoring.
Jim White for Ant support and other improvements.
Bruce R. Lewis implemented KRL and made other contributions.
Geoff Berry: Handle Exceptions attribute. Other improvements.
Tom Bousso re-implemented gnu.bytecode to make use
of ASM; plus other changes,
Shad Gregory improved JEmacs.
Al Petrofsky improved gnu.math printing and added some IntNum methods.
Marco Vezzoli: SRFI-1 tailoring for Kawa.
Albert Ting - old GuiConsole code.
Christian Surlykke ported JEmacs to use SWT.
Geoff Berry for various gnu.bytecode improvements.
Ivelin Ivanov and Tom Reilly for servlet support.
Anthony Green for Fedora packaging.
Charles Turner for pretty-printer improvements, improvements in the Common Lips support, and other changes.
Andrea Bernardini optimized the implementation of case, and
implemented full continuation support (in experimental callcc branch.
Julien Rousseau and Marius Kjeldahl contributed to Android support.
Peter Lane for many documentation improvements.
William D Clinger for test-cases.
Patrick Barta; Joseph Bowbeer; Dominique Boucher; Alexander Bunkenburg; Harold Carr; Emmanuel Castro; Álvaro Castro-Castilla; Sudarshan S Chawathe; Heather Downs; Francisco Vides Fernández; Nic Ferrier; Oliver Flasch; Weiqi Gao; Luke Gorrie; Mario Domenech Goulart; Zvi Har’E; Jeff Haynes; Ethan Herdrick; Joerg-Cyril Hoehle; Elliott Hughes; Mike Kenne; Brian Jones; Gerardo Jorvilleur; Simon Josefsson (JEmacs menu); Shiro Kawai; Thomas Kirk; Jay Krell; Timo Myyrä; Edouard Parmelan; Walter C. Pelissero; Rafael Jesus Alcantara Perez; Lynn Quam; Marcus Otto; Terje Pedersen (some XQuery functions); Matthias Radestock; Jim Rees; Ola Rinta-Koski; Andreas Schlapbach; Robert D. Skeels; Benny Tsai; Vladimir Tsichevski; Matthieu Vachon; Vasantha Ganesh; Phil Walker; Knut Wannheden; Chris Wegrzyn; Kay Zheng; Michael Zucchi.
Seth Alves; Khairul Azhar; Bob Bane; Hans Boehm; Adrián Medraño Calvo; Brian D. Carlstrom; Luis Casillas; Sudarshan S Chawathe; Ken Dickey (format tests); Helge Dietert; Allan Erskine; Marc Feeley (polytype.scm); Margus Freudenthal; Weiqi Gao; Andrea Girotto; Norman Hard; Gerardo Horvilleur; Yaroslav Kavenchuk; Felix S Klock II; Francois Leygues; Mirko Luedde; Leonardo Valeri Manera; Kjetil S. Matheussen; Alex Mitchell; Alex Moiseenko; Marc Nieper-Wißkirchen; Okumura Yuki; Edouard Parmelan; Walter C. Pelissero; Stephen L. Peters; François Pinard; Bill Robinson; Dan Stanger (Eaton Vance); Hallvard Traetteberg; Taylor Venable; Alessandro Vernet; Tony White John Whittaker; Robert Yokota.
Kawa includes Free Software originally written for other purposes, but incorporated into Kawa, perhaps with some porting. A partial list:
Dorai Sitaram wrote pregexp.
The rationalize algorithm is by Alan Bawden and Marc Feeley.
Lars T Hansen wrote SRFI-11 (let-values, let*-values macros).
Olin Shivers wrote the SRFI-1 list-processing library, and the SRFI-13 reference impementation.
John David Stone wrote SRFI-8 (receive macro)
Jussi Piitulainen wrote the SRFI-25 specification and tests.
Richard Kelsey and Michael Sperber wrote SRFI-34.
Anthony Carrico wrote the SRFI-37 reference implementation.
Panu Kalliokoski wrote the SRFI-69 reference implementation.
Donovan Kolbly wrote the srfi-64 “meta” testsuite. Alex Shinn improved SRFI-64 portability.
Philip L. Bewig wrote the SRFI-41 (streams) specification and reference implementation.
Simon Tatham wrote listsort.
Aubrey Jaffer wrote much of SLIB, some of which has been imported into gnu.kawa.slib. He also wrote some tests we’re using.