Slashgeo

A few weeks ago GIS Monitor published an interesting article about the state of GRASS GIS, including comments from Markus Neteler, who is one of the directors of the new Open Source Geospatial Foundation and major GRASS developer. From the article: "The new built-in GRASS GUI, developed within the past six months, is expanding the software's user base. Many more users than in the past, Neteler told me, are saying "I am new to GIS and I want to use GRASS." However, he acknowledges that it will take "many months" for the new GUI to become well known in the larger GIS community. [...] What is the single biggest current development in GRASS? It is porting it to Windows as a native application, says Neteler. Many users, he points out, are not interested in switching to Linux. "We expect to release the first official Windows version by the start of next year," he told me."

moovida writes "It is official, JGrass goes UDig ! The JGrass team feels that it is time to join forces to continue the constant growth they had in the last years. Lots of things that JGrass misses are supplied greatly in other java gisses. That is the main reason why the JGrass team has taken the decision to join the UDIG team with all the JGrass code that is possible to migrate to their project and join their community. This will mainly add raster analysis support to UDig and also hopefully bring the worlds of GRASS and UDig to know each other a bit better. The two teams had a first offical IRC maraton of which the logs can be found here, the WIKI page of the migration progress is here. The JGrass team will be supported by HydroloGIS and Riccardo Rigon at the CUDAM. Special thanks go to the UDig team for the help they already gave and will give in future. As Pope John XXIII stated and Riccardo Rigon often repeats, search for what will join, not for what will split you up."

The OSGeo mailing list links to a new articles on open source GIS from the GIS Development magazine, including articles on Quantum GIS and deegree. From the "Open Source Tools for GIS Professionals" article: "Open Source Software (OSS) has been maturing over the last years into robust, well-supported tools whose code base grows exponentially. Open Source GIS is no exception to this trend and it is now able to address the needs of GIS professionals worldwide. [...] Building on existing OSS operating systems, database, web services and software development technologies, today we find well-established OSS systems focused on geospatial applications. These systems range from spatially enabled databases like PostGIS, data analysis environments like GRASS, web server technologies (MapServer, GeoServer, Deegree) and client-building tools (MapBuilder, MapBender) to professional desktop GIS tools like gvSIG. Due to their emphasis on interoperability, these OSS tools have strong support for OGC standards, including web geoservices." See the open source community topic to learn more about previous stories on the subject.

The powerful open source GRASS GIS team has just released version 6.2.3: "This release fixes a number of bugs discovered in the 6.2.2 source code. It is primarily for stability purposes and adds minimal new features. Besides bug fixes it also includes a number of new message translations and updates for the help pages. Highlights include further maturation of the GRASS 6 GUI, vector, and database code. Some improvements have been backported from the GRASS 6.3 development branch where new development continues at a strong pace of approximately one code commit every hour, including major work on an all new cross-platform wxPython GUI and a native MS Windows port." Below I copied a few related previous stories.