Towards a stable open source GIS: Status and future directions in GRASS development

The ongoing GRASS GIS project is following the open source development model with fully accessible source code which is released under GNU General Public License and regular releases. The basic development is undertaken by the “GRASS Development Team”, special contributions are delivered by institutions or individual developers. If such contributions are interesting for a wider audience, they are integrated into the main GRASS system. In 2000 and first half of 2001 the development has been focusing on code stabilization and portability – GRASS shall be compliant to rather any UNIX derivate and MacOS X (Darwin) and, utilizing the CygWin tools, even on MS-Windows platforms. Important new features of GRASS 5.0.0 are introduced in this article. New ideas and changes will be introduced in the upcoming GRASS 5.1.0, the author briefly outlines basic ideas of proposed improvements. Due to recent changes the paper reflects latest development up to July 2001.