GRASS Incubation Progress

Project Evaluation Criteria

Project description: Commonly referred to as GRASS GIS, this is a Geographic Information System (GIS) used for geospatial data management and analysis, image processing, graphics/maps production, spatial modeling, and visualization. GRASS is currently used in academic and commercial settings around the world, as well as by many governmental agencies and environmental consulting companies.

Origin of project (commercial, experimental, thesis or other higher education, government)?: GRASS was developed from 1982-1995 by the US CERL (government). From 1997 it is developed in academic/research environment with worldwide contributors

The project is "geospatial", or directly in support of geospatial applications?: The software is a GIS, so, yes. Screenshots at http://grass.itc.it/grass60/screenshots/

Type of application (client, server, standalone, library, etc.)?: standalone with library (SWIG interface under development)

Hosted code in subversion?: No. Code is hosted in CVS and will be migrated to SVN on wald.intevation.de soon

The code is under an OSI approved license (data & doc projects need to specify their choice for a type of license)?: GRASS is licensed under the GNU GPL

Project willing to keep code clear of encumbrances (committer agreements, etc)?: Strong opposition of several members of the GRASS Development Team against the currently suggested committer agreement which would theoretically permit to relicense GRASS under MIT/X11. Clearly high interest to keep code clear of encumbrances. The GRASS Development Team made code provenance review for the GPL clearance in 1999 (some parts of the code had to be removed). Also the Debian clearance was done. More verifications were done for the indended relicensing of GRASS vector lib under LGPL.

Approved for Incubation?: Yes, selected for "founding project" incubation by the OSGeo board.

Project Steering Committee (PSC) established?: Partially. There are sufficient people nominated but not yet approved. This is blocked due to the proposed Committers Agreement which will not be accepted by various team members.

If you are not hosting at OSGeo, why should you be considered a member project of the OSGeo Foundation?: At least partial hosting make sense, if desired tools are available, also full hosting may be possible. In the meantime, by use of similar style sheets, logo etc. branding issues can be resolved.

Already reasonably mature (working quality code)?: GRASS has been in productive use for more than 15 years (developed for > 20 years). There are thousands of users worldwide. The roots go back to the year 1982 when the software was first implemented (see History). Since 31. Dec. 1999 its hosted in a CVS.

Already has a substantial user community?: The GRASS-user mailing list counts 628 subscribers (March 2006), the GRASS-dev counts 425 subscribers, there are more that 10 other mailing lists. The GRASS main site (1 million hits per month) is mirrored on more than 25 Web sites worldwide

Already has a substantial developer community?: since 1/2000 31 contributors in CVS with 10180 commits; 10 contributors with more than 100 commits; looking at 2006: 16 contributors (we are observing growing interest); Commits per week, averaged over 5 years: 37; in 2006: 53 commits per week; GRASS implements core GIS functionality for 2D/3D raster/voxel and 2D/3D vector along with vector network analysis and DBMS integration

Fills a gap in the foundation software stack?: GRASS is probably the only complete FOSS GIS. It fills the gap of being the software for geospatial data creation and analysis.

Prepared to develop in an open and collaborative fashion?: GRASS was ever developed in an open fashion. Contributors are always welcome.

Has contributions and interest from more than just one company/organization?: GRASS is used in public administration, private companies, by individuals and in academia (Who is using GRASS?)

Willing to migrate to foundation support infrastructure, and adopt website style consistent with the foundation?: The idea of OSGeo branding is generally supported. A complete migration, however, depends on the flexibility of provided tool. Currently functional infrastructure is available. The GRASS project seeks to use CMS for the Web pages (to migrate away from hand written HTML/PHP).