[OSGeo-Announce] Celebrating 35 years of GRASS GIS!

[Jorge Sanz]

Today marks 35 years of GRASS GIS development - with frequent releases
<https://grass.osgeo.org/download/software> the project keeps pushing the
limits in terms of geospatial data processing quality and performance.

GRASS (Geographic Resources Analysis Support System) is a *free and open
source Geographic Information System* (GIS) software suite used for
geospatial data management and analysis, image processing, graphics and map
production, spatial modeling, and 3D visualization. Since the major GRASS
GIS 7 version, it also comes with a feature rich engine for *space-time
cubes* useful for time series processing of *Landsat and Copernicus
Sentinel satellite data* and more. GRASS GIS can be either used as a
desktop application or as a backend for other software packages such as
*QGIS* and *R*. Furthermore, it is frequently used on *HPC and cloud*
infrastructures for massive parallelized data processing.

Brief history

In 1982, under the direction of Bill Goran at the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (CERL), two GIS
development efforts were undertaken. First, Lloyd Van Warren, a University
of Illinois engineering student, began development on a new computer
program that allowed analysis of mapped data.  Second, Jim Westervelt
(CERL) developed a GIS package called "*LAGRID – the Landscape Architecture
Gridcell analysis system*" as his master’s thesis. Thirty five years ago,
on 29 July 1983, the user manual for this new system titled "*GIS Version 1
Reference Manua*l" was first published by J. Westervelt and M. O'Shea. With
the technical guidance of Michael Shapiro (CERL), the software continued
its development at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Construction
Engineering Research Laboratory (USA/CERL) in Champaign, Illinois; and
after further expansion version 1.0 was released in 1985 under the
name *Geographic
Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS)*. The GRASS GIS community was
established the same year with the first annual user meeting and the launch
of GRASSnet, one of the internet's early mailing lists. The user community
expanded to a larger audience in 1991 with the "Grasshopper" mailing list
and the introduction of the World Wide Web. The users' and programmers'
mailing lists archives for these early years are still available online
<https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-user/>.
In the mid 1990s the development transferred from USA/CERL to The Open
GRASS Consortium (a group who would later generalize to become today's Open
Geospatial Consortium -- the OGC <https://www.opengeospatial.org/>). The
project coordination eventually shifted to the *international development
team* made up of governmental and academic researchers and university
scientists. Reflecting this shift to a project run by the users, for the
users, in 1999 GRASS GIS was released under the terms of the GNU General
Public License (GPL). A detailed history of GRASS GIS can be found at
https://grass.osgeo.org/history/.
Where to next?

The development on GRASS GIS continues with more energy and interest than
ever. Parallel to the *long-term maintenance* of the GRASS 7.4 stable
series, effort is well underway on the new upcoming cutting-edge 7.6 release
<https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/Grass7/NewFeatures76>, which will bring
many new features, enhancements, and cleanups. As in the past, the GRASS
GIS community is open to any contribution, be it in the form of programming,
documentation, testing <https://grass.osgeo.org/get-involved>, and financial
sponsorship <https://grass.osgeo.org/donations>. Please contact us
<https://grass.osgeo.org/home/contact-us>!

*About GRASS GIS*

The Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (https://grass.osgeo.org/),
commonly referred to as GRASS GIS, is an Open Source Geographic Information
System providing powerful raster, vector and geospatial processing
capabilities in a single integrated software suite. GRASS GIS includes
tools for spatial modeling, visualization of raster and vector data,
management and analysis of geospatial data, and the processing of satellite
and aerial imagery. It also provides the capability to produce
sophisticated presentation graphics and hardcopy maps. GRASS GIS has been
translated into about twenty languages and supports a huge array of data
formats. It can be used either as a stand-alone application or as backend
for other software packages such as QGIS and R geostatistics. It is
distributed freely under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
GRASS GIS is a founding member of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation
(OSGeo).



*The GRASS Development Team, July 2018*
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