Future direction (and a rant).

[Malcolm Williamson]

Angus and any other interested party,
I'd like to address the "why" part of your post. I just finished
teaching a semester course in GRASS, focusing primarily on 4.x and the
command line. I've taught this particular version of the class for four
years, and this year I had the absolute worst response from the students
in the class. "Why?", I asked myself. My teaching may have been less
enthusiastic, the students may not have been as good. However, I started
to wonder if the key isn't the fact that students are no longer
interested in learning command line programs. 

In our GIS curriculum, students are now exposed to Idrisi, GeoMedia, and
various combinations of ArcView and extensions. Why _would_ they want to
spend the time and effort learning a command line program, as well as
the underlying operating system? Sure, more advanced students often
return to GRASS because of its robustness and ease of automation, but
these features don't matter much to beginners.

Let me interject at this point that I'm very pleased with GRASS 5.0, and
that tcltkgrass looks mighty good for what it is. Yet Angus is correct,
GRASS needs a real, interactive display GUI if it ever wants to enter
the mainstream. Furthermore, it would be much more likely to be accepted
if it ran under the mainstream desktop OSs (heresy!!).

So, in the end, I think it comes down to the question of what we want
GRASS to be. Do we want it to simply be a solid, powerful tool for users
who are willing to learn it and don't want to pay for their software? Or
do we want to expand its appeal, to show the ESRI's of the world that
there are other approaches? I'm not sure where I stand.

My $.02, and not necessarily the opinion of my employer.

Best regards,
	-Malcolm

Malcolm D. Williamson                       malcolm at cast.uark.edu
Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies      Voice: 501-575-2734
12 Ozark Hall                                   Fax: 501-575-5218
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville AR 72701      
http://www.cast.uark.edu/