[OSGeo-Discuss] Can I do the same GIS tasks with OS (as with ESRI)?

[Randy George]

Sorry for the previous blank post.

	Open source is a great boon to small business innovation, as others
have pointed out. Anyone dependent on small business consulting/contracting
will have plenty of uses for open source tools. 

	I have also used Jump in place of ArcView for shp viewing (as well
as FWTools, Tatuk, AutoCAD, uDig, Geoserver ...). Shp seems to have become
largely a lowest common denominator interchange format with support
available all over. 

Of course ArcGIS/ArcInfo is a much different beast. It would take a good bit
of sophistication to beat it in breadth of spectrum with just a single tool.
There seems to be some kind of open source tool for most of the Arc
bandwidth so you can probably get by without an expensive license with a
little extra work.

randy

-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-bounces at lists.osgeo.org
[mailto:discuss-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Landon Blake
Sent: Thursday, April 24, 2008 2:36 PM
To: OSGeo Discussions
Subject: RE: [OSGeo-Discuss] Can I do the same GIS tasks with OS (as with
ESRI)?

A convert! Welcome Jennifer.

I can't speak for GRASS, but I know that OpenJUMP
(http://jump-pilot.sourceforge.net/OpenJUMP.html) could be compared to
the old 3.X Arcview. It has limited printing abilities at this point in
time, but I don't think there is a better cross-platform tool for basic
ESRI Shapefile manipulation. (I'm a volunteer on the project and
therefore biased in my opinion on this matter.)

I think you will find you can do 95% of what you could with ESRI
software, you'll just have to do it with an assortment of tools instead
of a single tool.

Landon

-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-bounces at lists.osgeo.org
[mailto:discuss-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Jennifer Horsman
Sent: Thursday, April 24, 2008 12:41 PM
To: OSGeo Discussions
Subject: [OSGeo-Discuss] Can I do the same GIS tasks with OS (as with
ESRI)?

The thread that was started today with the subject "Your open source 
career" got me thinking about asking a question that has been rolling 
around in my head. This is pointed at those people who have experience 
with ESRI products as well as OS GIS products.

I have been a long-time user of ESRI products, but I want to start my 
own contract business and will not be able to afford the license for 
ArcGIS/ArcInfo. So I recently set up a Linux box with GRASS installed, 
but it has been over 10 years since I have used GRASS (it has probably 
changed since then too!)

Does GRASS have the same analysis and display capabilities as ArcGIS? I 
know this is a very general question, so perhaps another question would 
be where does GRASS fall short and where does it excel in comparison to 
the ESRI products?

Thanks,
Jennifer



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