[winGRASS] hidden cost of GRASS

[John Huddleston]

Hello Suvrat,

It is not that winGrass is experimental.   It works as well as Grass on
Linux.  There
are the new areas where Grass is growing such as application to databases
and
java libraries.  The main core of Grass works very well indeed.

The real issue that I've found is the use of the Cygwin Xfree window system.
I purchased a $99 commercial X-Win system over three years ago, never had
to replace it, and have not had some of the problems reported by others.

Get a stable version and stick with it.  The Grass community is both a
resource
for questions, which should take care of most of your needs, and there are
many experts who you can pay to get started quickly if the need arises.

The maintenance, bugs, breakdowns are usually associated with hardware.  Get
a >2.4 Pentium with 512 MB of ram and a fast 80-200 GB hard drive and
you should have no problems.

You will need to be more specific of your needs for a more detailed reply.

John Huddleston




-----Original Message-----
From: wingrass-admin at grass.itc.it [mailto:wingrass-admin at grass.itc.it]On
Behalf Of Suvrat Kher
Sent: Tuesday, September 30, 2003 12:58 AM
To: wingrass at grass.itc.it
Subject: [winGRASS] hidden cost of GRASS


Hi all-

We are a small NGO looking to use GIS for natural resources applications.
Since GRASS is "free" there have been some discussion on using the software
in place of other commercial packages. Our group is only used to Windows and
have no expertise in Linux etc. Our concern is that since winGRASS is still
a bit experimental there will be hidden costs in terms of seeking expert
help in case of maintanence problems, bugs, breakdown etc., and resulting
lost productivity. Is there any study or assessement done that addresses
these issues in terms of quantifying these cost?

thanks for your help

Suvrat
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