[GRASS-user] what is jgrass

[Gerald Nelson]

I saw a recent post that included a reference to jgrass, which I had never heard of, so I went to the jgrass website, downloaded the manual, and spent about 3 minutes browsing it. One thing that struck me is the question of why is there both a jgrass version, written for cross-platform use, and the new efforts to make 'regular' grass (the 6.3 version we use around here on linux) run on windows and the mac. And for that matter there is qgis out there, which also has its own gui and uses grass code to do some gis things. From afar, it seems like there are some really talented, and incredibly dedicated, people out there who are kind of reinventing the same wheel.

Are there some politics I don't know about (it seems like an important part of these efforts is happening in Italy. Are Italian politics even more complicated than other politics?), are there really important differences among these efforts, is it just the nature of OS development efforts, or some combination of all of the above.

I hope noone is offended by these remarks. I watch the list traffic for 6.3 users and developers and am amazed by the way some very bright people, who might not ever have been in the same room together, collaborate productively. I'm just wondering late on a Sunday evening if there are ways to make this effort more efficient. As spatial data become ever more available, and processing costs continue to fall rapidly, open source tools for both exports and the masses become ever more valuable.

Regards,
Jerry
Gerald Nelson
Professor, Dept. of Agricultural and Consumer Economics
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
office: 217-333-6465 
cell: 217-390-7888
315 Mumford Hall
1301 W. Gregory
Urbana, IL 61801