I've talked with my supervisor about stepping up as GNATS maintainer.
He is willing to allow 5% of my time at work to contintribute to the
project.  However, there are a few hoops I have to jump through before
anything is official:

    1. I have to talk to the UMN Copyright Office to find out what their
       stance is.  Can I contribute?  Will they allow me and my
       supervisor to sign the FSF release?  Do they need to sign it?

    2. If the Copyright Office gives the OK, we need to get the OK from
       the Assistant Dean of the College.

If all this goes well, that still means only 5% development time in a
40+ hr work week.  Is two hours per week enough?  Obviously, to make
that an effective use of time, I'd have to block it off from other
activities.  I'm already adding personal time for the Debian packages
(although I have the OK to work on software we use for purposes of
installation and maintenance, it's not "officially" development time).

I'll keep you all posted.

-- 
Chad Walstrom <chewie@wookimus.net>           http://www.wookimus.net/
           assert(expired(knowledge)); /* core dump */