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GRASS-News
G
eographic
R
esources
A
nalysis
S
upport
S
ystem Volume 2, January 2005
Editorial
by Martin Wegmann
Dear
GRASS
user
,welcome to the second volume of 
GRASSNews
.Thefirstvolumereceivedalotofencouragementandrecommendations; thank you for the feedback. The
GRASSNews staff 
is still improving the Newsletterand happy to receive helpful comments.The
GRASSNews
Editorial Board applied for an
ISSN
number to make the Newsletter easily acces-sible for libraries. You can find it at the bottom of allpages and in the imprint.This volume mainly features the results of the
GRASS survey 2004
,which gives insight into theGRASS user community: How is GRASS used?;Where are improvements necessary? etc.. Subse-quent surveys might feature more detailed aspectsof GRASS capabilities or just address certain parts of the community (e.g. developers only). Please feelfreetocontacttheauthorsonthedeveloperlistifyouwould like to contribute to another survey.Moreover, the
GRASSNews
staff announces a
GRASS Poster Contest
to promote GRASS develop-ment and applications.TobroadentheinterestinGRASSandintheNewslet-terahigher diversityofarticlesis needed. PleasefeelfreetopresentyourworkwithGRASS,intheupcom-ing volumes this spring.I wish you interesting insights into the GRASS usercommunity.With best regardsMartin Wegmann
 Martin WegmannRemote Sensing and Biodiversity UnitDept. of Geography, University of Würzburg, GermanyBIOTA-Project
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Contents of this volume:
Editorial. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1GRASS Poster Contest. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2GRASS User Survey 2004. . . . . . . . . . . . . 2GRASS 6.0.0 beta1 release. . . . . . . . . . . . 17
 
GRASS-News Vol. 2, January 2005
GRASS Poster Contest
by Andrew Davidson & Martin Wegmann
Calling all artists!!!
The GRASS Project team is looking for posters thatcan be used to show what GRASS is and whatGRASS can do!!TheGRASScommunitywillvoteforthebestposters.The best three will be made available on the GRASSproject website.We are looking for two types of posters:1. one poster should focus on motivating GRASSdevelopment2. the othershould focus on motivating theuse of GRASS.Detailed instructions regarding poster format, sug-gested information content, and submission meth-ods can be found by following the appropri-ate links on the GRASS Project Website or at
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GRASS User Survey 2004
by Martin Wegmann & Moritz Lennert
Thanks to all those who participated in the GRASSsurvey (Nov. 2004). The results will be very helpfulfor the GRASS development team to understand theneeds of the user community, to uncover the draw- backs of GRASS in its different fields, and to im-prove GRASS for the end-user. In total, 304 GRASSusers participated in the survey (the actual numberof replies is given for each graph as
n =
). In particu-lar we thank all the participants (128) who agreed tohelp in the development of GRASS.
Summary of main results
Version 5.7 is the most installed version, but 5.3/4is the most run version. As many users install fromsource as from binaries. Most users run GRASS onGNU/Linux, and it seems that even those that nor-mallyuseMSWindowsfortheirwork,switchovertoGNU/Linux for using GRASS. This might reflect thefact that installation and usage via cygwin are stillviewed by many as an obstacle. GRASS is used invery diverse fields, with about 50% in environmentand geography. About 75% use GRASS either pro-fessionally or for their studies, and over half of re-spondents use GRASS in a university environment,with private companies following at roughly 15%.GRASS is still mostly used for raster data. Notsurprisingly, this is also the field in which GRASS is judged most mature (almost 70% call it either
very good
or
perfect
). The fields that need improvementmost of all are vector, visualisation, mapping, anddigitising capacities.Many respondents found the tutorials quite al-right, but they could be put more into evidence, asfor only 15% they were perfectly easy to find. Thenew GIS manager in 5.7 is seen as more useful andmore intuitive than the 5.4 tcltkgrass + d.dm, andover 50% of respondents plead for a native GRASSGUI, instead of integration with another softwarepackage such as QGIS or Thuban. At the same time,over 30% use GRASS in connection to PostgreSQLand over 25% in connection with R.Last, but not least, it is quite encouraging tosee the large number of respondents willing to con-tribute! However, it is also important to see that al-most 40% of those that are interested to contribute but haven’t done so up to now, haven’t done so be-cause they didn’t know how.
Basic information
GRASS users can be found around the world, for in-stance in Australia, China, Colombia, Cyprus, SouthAfrica or Ukraine (fig.1). Respondents come from46 different countries. In figure2all countries wheremore than 2% of respondents are based are dis-played.ISSN 1614-8746 2
 
GRASS-News Vol. 2, January 2005Concerning the question of which translationproject is most wanted, 86 languages were named.To see GRASS in languages like Farsi, Malayan orAfrikaans would be great, however least feasible atthe current point unless a few very motivated peo-ple start it. A list of the most wanted languages forGRASS can be seen in figure3.The GRASS demography is displayed in figure4,themean"age"ofthecommunity seemstobearound5 years. There are few very experienced users withmore than 10 years of experience and a majority of "newbies" using GRASS since 5 years or less, GRASSgains new users.Web search and colleagues proved to be the ma- jormeansofinitialcontactwithGRASS(fig.5). Some form of advertisement might change this pattern.Linux and Microsoft are named as the operatingsystems most often used for every day work (fig.6). Due to the various flavours of Linux, it might be in-teresting to split Linux into its several distributionsforthenextsurvey. Thiswouldprovideinformationswhich types of binary packages (rpm, deb, etc) aremost needed.Looking at platforms on which GRASS is used,a different picture emerges. GRASS is available onvarious platforms, the most popular aredisplayed infigure7.Compared to figure6, Linux gains, whereas MS Windows looses significantly. This might indi-cate that MS Windows users are hampered by theinstallation routine (this point will be elucidated inthe "Installation" section in figure24). The MacOSusersapparentlydidnotchangetheirplatformtouseGRASS. The installation routine seems to be moresuitable for these users than for MS Windows users.Various GRASS versions are at the moment offi-cially available or rather supported by the develop-ment team. The current development version 5.7.0isrunning on nearly 40 %, followed by 5.3/5.4 with 38% of host systems (fig.8). Version 4.3does not play asignificant role anymore and the number of 5.0 users(20 %) should drop in the close future as well due tothe new stable release. When looking at the GRASSversion used for the actual work, however, the num- ber of people using 5.7 drops significantly. The ver-sion which is used for the actual work is with 43 %version 5.3/5.4, this is 10 % more than 5.7.0 (fig.9). Also 5.0 holds a large percentage of users, probably because the 5.4 stable version was released only re-cently.To estimate the size of the GRASS user commu-nity in proportion to other GIS users in the same or-ganisation,weaskedforthenumberofGISusers(fig.10)and for the number of GRASS users (fig.11). A large discrepancy between these two graphs can beseen. A large number of users are either solely usingGRASS in their organisation or together with 5 to 10other persons.
Neth. Slov. UK Pol. Spain Braz. France Can Italy Ger. USA
      p      e      r      c      e      n       t      a      g      e       0       1       0       2       0       3       0       4       0
Figure 2:
Where are you based?
All countries wheremore than 5 % of GRASS users are based (n = 303).
Ind Jp Norw. Braz. Chin. Hung. Port. CZE Pol Fren. Span. Ital. Ger.
      p      e      r      c      e      n       t      a      g      e       0       5       1       0       1       5       2       0
Figure 3:
In which language would you like to seeGRASS being translated?
(n = 217)
newbies < 1 year< 2 years< 5 years< 10 years> 10 years
      p      e      r      c      e      n       t      a      g      e       0       5       1       0       1       5       2       0       2       5
Figure 4:
For how long have you been usingGRASS?
(n = 302)ISSN 1614-8746 3
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