I find the Modern Fortran logo (Capital letter F in a purple square) very nice, simple, and solid. Is it a logo officially designed by the committee? I would like to know more about it, e.g., why the color purple is used.
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It was designed by @jacobwilliams and @milancurcic with the approval of others and no objections. We chose the purple color because it looked good. The letter F is from the original Fortran manual from the 50s.
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I really like this logo. Who owns it? What license does it use?
There are T-shirts using this logo:
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It is available in Wikimedia:
published under license CC0 (public domain).
About purple:
According to contemporary surveys in Europe and the United States, purple is the color most often associated with rarity, royalty, magic, mystery and piety.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple
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I had not seen the T-shirt yet, but I’ve been bothered by the sales of Fortran notebooks on Amazon and Fortran cups. Some even have programs that are just plain wrong:
If Fortran-lang ever becomes an organization I would not mind it offering Fortran merchandise like shirts, notebooks, cups, as long as the earnings are used to support modern Fortran projects.
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Later, we can sell merchandise and use the money to pay for development. Sort of like GSoC. I have a lot of experience paying students to work on open source. The process works great, the hardest is to find a revenue stream. 
Anyway, I am not bothered by people trying to sell things like that. On the contrary, it means they think somebody will buy it, so there is a business opportunity!
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Thanks Asdrubal,
It works in my browser, but this is the raw link if you have problems:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fortran_logo.svg
The Julia people are genius in terms of marketing and monetizing Julia. Fortran really needs some marketing to reimagine its public impressions.
Julia has the Julia Computing Company:
In July 2021, Julia Computing announced they raised a $24 million Series A led by Dorilton Ventures,[110] which also owns Formula 1 team Williams Racing, that partnered with Julia Computing.
Julia (programming language) - Wikipedia
Fortran has no marketing, rather punched cards… It runs on the most powerful supercomputers in the world, but you will mainly find punched cards when searching Fortran images 
After looking on the web for Fortran big simulation pictures, I can tell that often the websites of those big models do not even tell their code is Fortran (or mainly Fortran), maybe because as scientists they don’t care what language is used if it works… Or it’s obvious it’s Fortran…
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The PARDISO solver project (which judging by the documention) is written in Fortran, and is also used by Williams Grand Prix Racing and several other important companies in various fields (see the industrial customers on the PARDISO home page). Can this be used to promote the Fortran language? I’m not sure, but it does appear to work for Julia.
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There is no C++ company and no Python company, no Rust company, no JavaScript company. There actually already is a Fortran Company, but my vision for a Fortran Company would be something like the Julia Computing, which will be employing people, that work on the Fortran compiler, organize FortranCon, and so on. In Julia’s case it is easier as they simply employed all the initial founders. But we can’t employ the Fortran founders. So it is harder for us to get “legitimacy”.
I think it is too early. Let’s deliver on fpm, stdlib and a Fortran compiler that fixes our complaints about Fortran (and delivers on our wishes too!). We are not there yet on either of these efforts. I feel once we get closer to the goal, the excitement about Fortran will skyrocket, and we will be in a much better position to figure out how to make it financially sustainable also.
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To elaborate on my previous comment. I worry that if somebody or we start a new Fortran Company, it will only create more division. And we don’t want more division, we need to come together to fix Fortran. However, if we structure it like the Python scientific ecosystem is structured, there are tons of companies who contribute back, such as Enthought, Anaconda, Quansight, QuantStack, Kitware, Microsoft, and many others. They all contribute back to the foundational set of tools, such as NumPy, SciPy, Jupyter, Matplotlib, as well as the rich ecosystem of libraries build on top. I think this approach would work very well for Fortran, to have fortran-lang a non-profit, similar perhaps to the Python Software Foundation, an then have commercial companies around it, and have foundational set of open source tools that we all need, and then tons of libraries and applications build on top, open source and commercial. Structured that way, I think the tensions would be low, and we can all work effectively together.
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Simply putting more Fortran projects on GitHub with their benchmark information will be the easiest way to gain more exposure.
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C++ and javascript are heavily backed by Google, Microsoft, and many other corporations. Rust is backed by the Mozilla foundation. However, I don’t think there is a need for another Fortran company. Since Fortran is used in so many national labs, can they spare some funds to hire people to work on open-source Fortran toolchains and compilers like fpm, std, and GFortran? Compared to paying for commercial Fortran toolchains, that could benefit more people.
I think they are helping to fund Flang through the Exascale Computing Project.
https://www.exascaleproject.org/research-project/flang/
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The logo is currently covered by the license of the Fortran-lang website, and the uploader was likely not the copyright holder. However, I’m happy they did and the logo is now used all over the internet.
Also, I took the liberty to adapt @jacobwilliams’s design, and publish it under MIT on the website, as @certik explained, and perhaps this was not the cleanest way to do it either.
For assets like this, CC-BY may be more appropriate than MIT (I think easier to reuse but I don’t understand all the nuances).
Regarding shirts, it’s nice that somebody’s making them already. I consider the logo a public good and it’s only good that people can purchase and wear the Fortran shirts. And somebody can make a few bucks doing it.
But, it’d be nice if Fortran-lang can have their own “merch” to help fund development, like conference registration for students and similar. And it’s easier than ever to have an online t-shirt store. For example, Threadless Artist Shops provides a fully-featured and 100% free online store with on-demand merch printing where you earn anything above the base cost of the item. If anybody would like to take a lead on this I will be happy to assist. It’s something that’s been on my mind for a while but there are so many things to do. And I’d like to buy and wear Fortran merch while supporting a cause.
@milancurcic , it seems possible to edit the license in Wikimedia. The MIT license is not in the licenses they propose. If you want, I can try to edit and put a CC-BY license, which is closer to the MIT license than CC-0.
And I can also edit the “Source” field which states “Own work”, which is unfair if you are the author. Or I could write “Fortran-lang community”.
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I don’t see any problem with the way it is right now. I suggest the following:
- Let’s discuss and decide how we want logo and similar assets licensed (CC0? CC-BY?)
- Adopt and state that in the GitHub repo.
- Edit the Wikimedia entry.
Yes, I would prefer attributing it to the Fortran-lang community.
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