GRASS Community

About the project

Freedom

The GRASS GIS project is developed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (the GPL) in the open by volunteers the world over.

GRASS differs from many other GIS software packages used in the professional world in that it is developed and distributed by users for users; mostly on a volunteer basis, in the open, and is given away for free.

Emphasis is placed on interoperability and unlimited access to data as well as software flexibility and evolution rate - both added features and bug minimization.

• How the Open Source software development model works

• WikiPedia entry discussing the GPL

The GRASS Community and the Development Team

• The Community
• The Development Team
• The Translation Team
• The GRASS Project Steering Committee

Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo)

• Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo.org) was established in Chicago in 2006. GRASS GIS is a founding project.
  • Historical document: Potential tasks and responsibilities (earlier proposal)
  • Historical document: GRASS Project Incubation at the OSGeo Foundation

Getting Help

Mailing lists

• The primary point of contact for GRASS GIS user help and development coordination is on the mailing lists. The answers to many questions you may have will probably already have been addressed and will be waiting for you in the mailing lists archives.
• Because the mailing lists are so critical to the project's success, and support comes entirely from time-strapped volunteers and colleagues, we request some mailing list etiquette be followed.

IRC communication

IRC is live Internet Relay Chat. The GRASS project maintains a "chatroom" as well and if you are lucky there may be someone logged on who can give you a quick answer.

• How to participate in IRC communication (#grass, #osgeo, #gdal, #qgis, #mapserver and other channels)

Documentation

• You've already discovered the wiki. Go forth and explore!
• Check out the GRASS Documentation Project

Programming support

• See the Support page

Community resources

GRASS education (Free GIS education)

The GRASS education (Free GIS education) wiki site offers a start to collect links, text documents and small images. Furthermore it provides a discussion platform to develop and collect approaches, techniques, exercises and course structures for people giving GRASS and/or other Free GIS courses.

• GRASS education (Free GIS education)

Promoting GRASS GIS

• GRASS promotion team
• Promotional material
• GRASS migration hints
• GRASS Propaganda

Conferences

• See Open Source GIS History
• GRASS GIS related workshops and presentations

Seminars and Courses

• Refer to your preferred Web search engine

GRASS GIS Addon modules

• GRASS GIS AddOns] - software contributed by the community

Project statistics

• Openhub software statistics
  • Summary of commits: https://www.openhub.net/p/grass_gis/commits/summary (note that GRASS GIS is 20 years older than what Openhub covers :-)
  • Lines of Code (5/2016): 1,776,809
  • Currently (5/2016) 19 active core developers and many Addons developers
  • Commits by top contributors: https://www.openhub.net/p/grass_gis/contributors/summary
  • Factoids via OSGeo-Live Project Metrics: http://live.osgeo.org/en/metrics.html (all OSGeo projects)
• OSGeo community statistics:
  • https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/VisibilityStats
• GRASS GIS Wiki statistics
• Mailing list subscribers (5/2016):
  • grass-user: 1060
  • grass-announce: 377
  • grass-dev: 332
  • Probably one of the longest existing mailing list archives in the Internet: since 1991, see https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-dev/ and https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-user/
• Software under development since 1982, nowadays automated quality control with Travis CI etc