GRASS status (was: [Freegis-list] GRASS still quite far from usable)

[Bernhard Reiter]

Am 15. Sep 2005 um 20:34:58 schrieb Artem Pavlenko:
> Regarding the recent discussion about GRASS, I feel the time is right 
> for some positive changes. Just like Ben Discoe, over the years I have 
> tried to like GRASS and it always failed me and I gave up. 

From my perspective GRASS has improved constantly and keeps improving.
It could be even better, of course.
This is a matter of person power and money.

So you can help with directly improving GRASS 
or strengthening the buiness world around it.

(As my company offers GRASS services for over 5 years,
I can tell you that demand has been quite low.)

> I'm very passionate about Free Software and it is painful for me to see, 
> year after year, GRASS taking the same old arrogant 'command-line' 
> stance, while at the same time miserably failing potential users all 
> over the world. 

> Paolo Cavallini wrote:

> >It would be easy to overlook such critiques, but I think there is an 
> >element of truth we should take seriously. 

I do not think this is arrogant neither is the critic overlooked.

But for those who have never tried GRASS, things have to be seen in
perspective:

GRASS has a Tcl/Tk interface which is not too bad for years.
QGIS has become a frontend for several operations and there are
other approaches.
GRASS has stabilised its code base, developed a completely new
vector engine and gained much more helpers for programming and instructions.
I guess that more and more people are trying GRASS.

These are all good developments,
but of course more can be done and this depends on us all.

	Bernhard
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