[GRASS-dev] QGIS & GRASS

[Paolo Cavallini]

Hi all.
Even though these "web statistics" are always to be taken with caution:
http://www.google.com/insights/search/overviewReport?cat=&q=qgis&geo=&date=&gprop=&clp=&cmpt=q#q=qgis%2Cgrass
gis&cmpt=q
(thanks Maxim for pointing it out)
I think they tell us several interesting things, particularly from the
point of view of users (those most likely to use a search engine for the
sw they are using/trying to use):
- qgis is on the rise, grass is decreasing. I do not think this means
there is competition between the two, but rather that people use the two
programs as a toolset, doing what is best done with each of them. It
seems that qgis is replacing grass for simpler (desktop) tasks, and
grass is mainly used for more complex analyses
- for both programs, the association between the two terms (qgis+grass)
is among the top ranking search items; this confirms the above hypothesis
- together, they are much more popular that their main alternative, gvSIG:
http://www.google.com/insights/search/overviewReport?cat=&q=qgis&geo=&date=&gprop=&clp=&cmpt=q#q=qgis%2Cgrass
gis%2Cgvsig&cmpt=q .
Unfortunately, it seems that both qgis and grass devs are mainly
concentrated on their core sw, with limited attention to the interaction
between the two (eg the qgis-plugin-grass does not have a dedicated dev,
and in grass a lot of dev effort has been put to implement a new UI,
replicating many functionalities already usable in qgis (also for grass
layers).
I would therefore respectfully suggest devs, form the users perspective,
to consider concentrating on the best of each world, reducing the
duplication of efforts, and improving the (already good) interaction
between the two programs.
On the other hand, I would suggest users to invest some resources to go
in the same direction. As a part of this, I'm investing some money (and
I plan to do more in the future) to fix long standing bugs in qgis,
personally mainly focusing on the qgis-plugin-grass:
http://www.qgis.org/wiki/index.php/Bugs
All the best.
-- 
Paolo Cavallini: http://www.faunalia.it/pc