Information:1997

[Paul W. Box]

The greatest advantage with Arc/INFO is that, if you need to do
something that you've never done before, you can call up the support
desk and get a reasonable answer fairly quickly.  There is also a huge
user community that can probably give you an answer pretty quickly if
you really need it.   There is also a large community using grass, but
you need to be able to wait a few days if you have a question that needs
answering via the newsgroup.

Arc/INFO is probably your better choice if you are in a commercial
environment, where you are churning out all kinds of maps for different
customers with different needs.  

The disadvantages to Arc/INFO is it's price (thousands of dollars), and
it's general all-or-nothing attitude about using it.  Even thought it's
broken up into a few modules, you have to buy the entire module even if
you only wish to use a few functions.  They are also very protective
about how one accesses the software-- the programs in place to limit the
number of users to the number of purchased licences also limits the
number of processes that it can run.  This presents no problems for a
work environment consisting of minimum-wage technicians editing
coverages or doing rudimentary analyses, but makes it very impractical
to write programs of any degree of complexity.

Arc also insists on one of the worlds stupidest scripting languages to
access it's routines and datasets, though I understand that this will
change in a future release.  The present scripting language is at best
adequate for simple system administration and batch processing tasks,
but is a nightmare for writing useful scientific applications.

Grass has a steeper learning curve, and you are better off if you are
self-sufficient in finding answers to technical problems.  However, it's
open, free, and is able to interface nicely with any program you write
in proabably any language you choose.  I use both in my present job-- I
still turn to Arc for doing the stuff that generates money for our lab
(Arc sure makes pretty maps), but I turn to grass if I am interested in
scientific analysis of any degree of complexity.  

These are just my opinions-- this probably isn't the best place or a
'who has the best software' debate.
-- 
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/*  Paul Box                      |        Cogito ergo                */
/*  Dept. of Geography            |      Oculum Dioscoreum            */
/*  University of Florida         |                                   */
/*  sanduku at nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu   |     (I think, therefor            */
/*  http://grove.ufl.edu/~sanduku |           eye yam)                */
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