[GRASSLIST:9051] Re: ArcView vs GRASS

[Thomas Adams]

Dear GRASS Community:

This discussion is far too interesting to pass making some comments. 
First off, I could not agree more with most (if not all) comments. The 
price/performance comparison alone makes GRASS the easy winner and the 
user support is outrageously good. I work for aU.S. federal agency and 
admittedly the GRASS community is small by comparison to ESRI. That's an 
irony, of course, since GRASS was developed by the U.S. Army Corps of 
Engineers. What is also ironic is that there is a strong analogy between 
ESRI/GRASS and the MS-Windows/Intel versus Apple Macintosh/Linux world — 
but with an interesting twist. The reason many have identified for the 
groundswell of GIS users using ESRI software is ease of use with the GUI 
which purportedly is not available with GRASS. Some comments have shown 
this is not quite the case.

The lack of cross-platform support with ESRI software is a huge issue 
with many and has caused significant problems in my agency due to the 
fact that our real-time operational environment is Linux; we would like 
to have GIS intimately intertwined with our operational environment at 
each workstation (having multiple monitors) but this really crowds the 
desktop space not to mention that one would have to use simultaneously a 
MS-Windows environment on one computer and Linux on the other — what a 
mess!! So, I have been gently pushing GRASS when the opportunity 
presents itself.

For much of what we do at U.S. National Weather Service (NWS) River 
Forecast Centers involves handling large amounts of GIS data 
repetitively. This means that scripts must be used to handle the 
analysis of these data. It is quite easy in GRASS to write simple shell, 
Perl, or whatever scripts to handle the data analysis requirements we have.

I should also add the importance of GRASS/QGIS interoperability and 
interoperability with R, gstat, GMT, etc. Combined, these make an 
incredibly powerful GIS environment that easily rivals the ESRI world. 
ESRI still holds the marketing edge with the perception of creating 
stunning maps, which captures the attention of end-users. Probably a 
stronger tie between GMT and GRASS would help.

GRASS rocks!


Māris Nartišs wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I'm leading GIS practical works for students and we use ArcGIS. Most
>of students after those practical works have no clue why they where
>pressing all those buttons, they even have no clue what is coordinate
>system and why they should define it. Formally they are educated GIS
>users, but in reality they are dumb as brick. I have to agree - easy
>to use systems may lead to dumb users - You can do all stuff without
>understanding why You are doing this.
>
>On 11. 11. 2005. we had so called "GIS Day". I was there with
>presentation about Open Source. There was some interest from some huge
>(in local terms ;) companies about OS GIS solutions. Most of interest
>was about MapServer - looks like this will be OS GIS tool No. 1. in
>nearest future. Most of ppl are not ready for open source and are not
>ready to think, but I'm doing my best to show that OS GIS can be used
>instead of closed source tools.
>
>As I see, GDAL/OGR has Geodatabase support, as ESRI has published its
>shema, only problem - it can be accessed via ODBC. There is a mdb read
>library on SF.net. We need someone to put all this stuff in one peace.
>
>
>With thanks to all OS developers and supporters,
>Maris Nariss.
>
>
>2005/11/13, Francisco Alonso <alonsarp at um.es>:
>  
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>>I have been teaching GIS using GRASS for years and definitively good students
>>adquire a better knowledge about what GIS is than using ArcView. However the
>>ironic result is that when they have a job, and they have it easely, they
>>have to work with ArcView "because it is what their employers bought". At the
>>end they do the stuff in GRASS and show it with Arc.View!
>>
>>Best regards
>>
>>Paco
>>
>>--
>>Francisco Alonso Sarría
>>Departamento de Geografía (Area de Geografía Física)
>>Universidad de Murcia. Campus La Merced
>>E-30001 Murcia
>>Telfn: +34 968364357
>>www.um.es/geograf/sigmur
>>
>>
>>    
>>
>
>  
>


-- 
Thomas E Adams
National Weather Service
Ohio River Forecast Center
1901 South State Route 134
Wilmington, OH 45177

EMAIL:	thomas.adams at noaa.gov

VOICE:	937-383-0528
FAX:	937-383-0033