[GRASSLIST:5593] Re: [GRASS5] Re: [Fwd: whinging about GRASS again]

[Mark P. Line]

Markus Neteler said:
> On Tue, Feb 01, 2005 at 01:53:42AM -0600, Mark P. Line wrote:
>> Russell Nelson said:
> ...
>> >
>> > Everyone agrees that GRASS has a steep learning curve of its own,
>> > independent on the GIS learning curve.  Consequently, there must be
>> > many people who would like to do GIS analysis using GRASS, but have
>> > not gotten past the learning curve.
>>
>> That tells me that there are people not currently using GRASS. I already
>> knew that, and that was not my question.
>
> Maybe he took literally a comment in the document "Introduction to GRASS
> 4" by James Westervelt, June 11, 1991:
>
> http://grass.itc.it/devel/grass1to4history.html
> "...
>  1988 	GRASS 3.0	Distribution to about 1000 sites.
>  1991 	GRASS 4.0	Distribution to every household.
> "

That sounds like something Jim would have written.

IIRC, they polled something on the order of 30,000 seats worldwide in
1993. I think I was able to confirm that magnitude pretty well in 1995.

Judging from the number of backwater federal installations in which I was
finding 5-10 GRASS users (using shared locations, I might add...) in the
second half of the 90's and by extrapolating your itc.it webstats to 20+
mirrors, I'm not inclined to believe that the user base has shrunk in the
meantime.


-- Mark

Mark P. Line
Polymathix
San Antonio, TX