Community based software development: The GRASS GIS project

Tomorrow I’ll give a talk at University of Trento about the question why free software development works. Focus will be on GRASS, a Geographic Information System (GIS) used for geospatial data management and analysis, spatial modeling, and visualization. The project has an outstanding history as it was originally started a military project, but in the public domain. With the advent of Internet and related network based development tools a community was formed. Nowadays, both users and developers are spread over the globe and manage to develop this software with low administrational overhead and a good communication culture. This seminar reviews the technical and social aspects of this Free GIS project.

You can get the seminar slides here.

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About Markus

Markus Neteler , a founding member of FOSSGIS.de (D-A-CH), GFOSS.it (Italy) and the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), was head of the GIS and Remote Sensing Unit at the Research and Innovation Centre of the Fondazione Edmund Mach, Trento, Italy from 2008 to 2016. In 2015 he co-founded the company mundialis (Bonn, Germany), a start-up specialised in open source development and massive data processing. He is the author of several books and chapters on GRASS and various papers on GIS applications. Passionate about open source GIS, he became a GRASS GIS user in 1993 and a developer in 1997, and has been coordinating its development ever since.