In my presentation I briefly review 3 decades of Open Source GIS development, from the 1980th to the present.
See my slides:
Presentation file: Download presentation file (ODP) to get all the clickable links working!
A second release candidate of GRASS GIS 6.4.3 with improvements and stability fixes is now available.
Source code:
 https://grass.osgeo.org/grass64/source/
 https://grass.osgeo.org/grass64/source/grass-6.4.3RC2.tar.gz
Selected Binaries (more will be published)
To get the RC2 source code from SVN:
 svn checkout https://svn.osgeo.org/grass/grass/tags/release_20121218_grass_6_4_3RC2/
An announcement has been drafted at
 https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/Release/6.4.3RC2-News
Key improvements of the GRASS 6.4.3 release include some new functionality (image processing tools), major speedup for some vector modules, fixes for the wxPython based portable graphical interface, improvements for the Python API, enhanced portability for MS-Windows (native support), and more translations.
Release candidate management at
 https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/Grass6Planning
Please join us in testing this release candidate for the final release.
Thanks to all contributors!
The GRASS GIS team will organize a GRASS GIS Community Sprint from 2-7 Feb, 2013 in Genova, Italy. The sprint is at the same time of the “XIV Meeting degli Utenti Italiani GRASS e Gfoss” at the University of Genova.
We would like to invite you to financially support this upcoming Community Sprint! The past sprints have been very successful as we expect for the upcoming one.
Important Web page:
https://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/GRASS_Community_Sprint_Genova_2013
Please consider to donate:
https://grass.osgeo.org/donations/
Background info
The GRASS GIS Community Sprint is a great occasion for folks to support the development by actively contributing to the source code, manuals or likewise. The community sprint is a get-together for GRASS project members and supporters and related OSGeo projects to take decisions and tackle larger problems. For this meeting, we welcome people committed to improving the GRASS GIS project and the interfaces to QGIS, GDAL, PostGIS, R-stats. Sextante. gvSIG, OGC Services and more. This includes developers, documenters, bug reporters, translators and other OSGeo supporters. Not only the “C Tribe” will be addressed but also Python or whatever the participants prefer.
Earlier this Last year, in June, Don Meltz wrote an interesting blog “ArcGIS vs QGIS Clipping Contest Rematch” where he let compete ArcGIS and Quantum GIS in a clipping contest. The benchmark contest data set in question is a 878MB ZIP file (ContourClipTest.zip with the (guessed) EPSG Code 2260 – NAD83 / New York East (ftUS)). The blog page gained a lot of comments, even from ESRI since some ArcGIS versions crashed on this test data set.
Find below the various timings compiled from the blog and the comments:
| Software | Processing time | Hardware/Software |
| ArcGIS 9.3 | crash after 1h 9min: ERROR 999999: Error executing function. Invalid Topology [4gb file limit.] Failed to execute (Clip) | unknown |
| ArcGIS 10.0 | crash likewise | unknown |
| ArcGIS 10.1 | ESRI promise to calculate it in 34 seconds in this updated version (did anyone test?) | unknown |
| GlobalMapper (version?) | 30 mins | unknown |
| GlobalMapper v11.02 | 49 sec | Windows XP w/ 3.5GB RAM |
| Manifold 8 (64bit) | 31 min | Windows XP64 16 gb. RAM and 2.33 GHz |
Note: The two GlobalMapper results are a bit funny, perhaps always minutes?
| Software | Processing time | Hardware/Software |
| Quantum GIS (version?; Simple features) | 4-5 min | unknown |
| GRASS GIS 7 (topological GIS) | 5 min | Dell PowerEdge 2950 from 2008, Intel Xeon 2.66GHz, 8GB RAM |
| gvSIG | to be done | |
| PostGIS | to be done |
Notes: Hope volunteers will test this also on gvSIG and PostGIS (and other FOSSGIS)! Please report…
The program of the GFOSSDAY 2012 + OSMit2012 @ Torino, Italy, has been published:
https://www.gfoss.it/drupal/gfossday2012/programma
We offer there a GRASS GIS workshop on Friday 16th Nov 2012 at 9:30. You are welcome!
Location:
Centro Incontri Regione Piemonte, Corso Stati Uniti 23, Torino, Italy
In winGRASS 7 (download standalone installer) the Windows batchfiles for use with R (https://code.google.com/p/batchfiles/) are now integrated for a smooth GRASS-R-coupling in MS-Windows. For the usage see here:
https://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/R_statistics#Usage_III
Note that this integration is available for Linux users for a long time, however, finally also the winGRASS user can enjoy this integration!
Thanks to Helmut Kudrnovsky from the GRASS GIS team and to the Windows batchfiles for use with R team.
In order to prepare the upcoming GRASS GIS 6.4.3 release, a major bugtracker cleanup has been done for GRASS 6 over the past few days. More than open 370 trac tickets (back to GRASS 6.4.0) were revisited, updated or closed: the GRASS GIS bugsquashing team submitted over 140 code changes, and subsequently 88 tickets could be closed in these few days. The few remaining critical tickets are being worked on, leading to a new stable GRASS GIS 6.4.3 release to be expected soon.
The next “GRASS GIS Community Sprint” will take place from May 23 to May 28, 2012 in Prague, Czech Republic directly following the Geoinformatics FCE CTU 2012 conference.
This GRASS Community Sprint is a great occasion for you to support the development by actively contributing to the source code, manuals or likewise. It is a get together for GRASS project members and supporters to make decisions and tackle larger problems. For this meeting, we welcome people committed to improving the GRASS GIS project. This includes developers, documenters, bug reporters, translators and others.
Timing and Duration:
May 23, 2012 (day of arrival) – May 28, 2012 (day of departure)
Venue:
Department of Mapping and Cartography Faculty of Civil Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague
For more detailed information, please visit
https://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/GRASS_Community_Sprint_Prague_2012
GRASS GIS 6.4.2 released
19 February 2012
https://grass.osgeo.org
We are pleased to announce the release of a new stable version of GRASS GIS. This release fixes bugs discovered in version 6.4.1 of the program and adds a number of new features. This release includes over 760 updates to the source code since 6.4.1. As a stable release series, the 6.4 line will enjoy long-term support and incremental enhancements while preserving backwards-compatibility with the entire GRASS 6 line.
The new wxPython graphical user interface (wxGUI) has been updated with many new features and tools. Python is now a fully supported scripting language, including an updated Python toolkit to simplify the authoring of personal scripts, support for NumPy based array calculations, and a Python application interface for the GRASS C libraries. Additionally, MS-Windows support continues to mature. GRASS 6.4.2 debuts ten new modules, a new GUI cartographic composer tool, a new GUI object-oriented modeling environment, and improved infrastructure for installing community supplied add-on modules.
Read the full story at
https://grass.osgeo.org/announces/announce_grass642.html
About GRASS GIS
The Geographic Resources Analysis Support System, commonly referred to as GRASS, is an Open Source Geographic Information System (GIS) and geospatial analysis toolkit. For nearly three decades, GRASS has provided powerful raster, vector, and geospatial processing engines in a single integrated software suite. GRASS includes tools for spatial modeling of raster and vector data, visualization, the management and analysis of geospatial information, and the processing of satellite and aerial imagery. It also provides the capability to produce sophisticated presentation graphics and publication-quality hardcopy maps. GRASS has now been translated into twenty languages and supports an extensive array of data formats. It is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
GRASS differs from many other GIS software packages used in the academic and professional worlds in that it is developed and distributed by users for users, mostly on a volunteer basis. Its code and spatial processing algorithms are open and transparent, and the software is distributed free of charge. The source code is also freely available, allowing for immediate customization, examination of the underlying algorithms, the addition of new features, and faster identification and patching of bugs.
Watch how the community based GRASS GIS software development works! You can see how the individual contributors modify and expand the source code.
The corresponding timeline is available at https://grass.osgeo.org/devel/grasshist.html
Download the high resolution version from https://grass.fsv.cvut.cz/video/
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