[GRASSLIST:9058] Re: ArcView vs GRASS

[Dylan Beaudette]

On Nov 14, 2005, at 4:30 AM, Thomas Adams wrote:

> 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.
>

Interesting times indeed.

> 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.
>

Here in the small Land, Air, and Water Resources Dept. of the 
University of Ca in Davis I have been confronted with the same 
problems. Many of my collegaues and I use Linux and MacOS, yet GIS in 
integrated deeply into our research (soil science). I became a GRASS 
user out of both curiosity AND neccessity. Fortunately, with every 
ESRI-related mess that my collegues have to deal with, one more comes 
and asks about GRASS. Thos last screen shots from Radim were quite 
excellent, and I am looking forward to trying out the GRASS->QGIS 
plugin system.

> 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.
>
>

Good point. As with GRASS, I made myself learn how to use GMT out of 
neccessity: I needed high quality cartographic output. There have been 
numerous efforts to integrate GRASS and GMT, including: shape2gmt, 
r.out.gmt.py (David F.), r.out.gmt (Hamish and I), as well as 2 new 
modules that are currently only on paper v.out.gmt (Hamish and I), and 
possibly g.out.gmt (complete GMT script creation- Hamish and I).

I am enjoying this thread quite a bit. Perhaps it would be a good idea 
to summarize the important points, and put it up somewhere. Maybe 
adjusting the tone a bit so as not to be too abrasive, :) .

Cheers,

--
Dylan Beaudette
Soils and Biogeochemistry Graduate Group
University of California at Davis
530.754.7341