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."

markusN writes "GRASS GIS 6.1.0 released 11 August 2006. A new technology preview version of GRASS GIS is being released today in preparation for the next benchmark release, GRASS 6.2. This feature release, version 6.1.0, improves upon the previous stable version of GRASS by adding hundreds of new features as well as support for the latest GIS data formats. See also Full announcement." The rest of the press release below.

Anonymous Voxel writes "During the closing plenary of the FOSS4G 2006 conference Markus Neteler was honored with the Sol Katz GFOSS Award for 2006 FOSS4G 2006 conference. Markus is the leader of the GRASS GIS project, and has played a pivotal role in the revitalization of the project and its community. Markus is also a founding member of OSGeo, and has been active in building the broader FOSS4G community for many years."

Tyler Mitchell writes "FOSS4G 2006 Conference — A Great Success. 5 October 2006. The energy and enthusiasm of the Free and Open Source Software for Geoinformatics (FOSS4G) Conference continues to grow. This year over 500 attendees made their way to Lausanne, Switzerland from September 12-15th to participate in this annual international event. The conference began with a day and a half of more than 25 hands-on workshops. They covered web mapping, desktop applications, 3D visualization, and much more. As in years past, these workshops were completely sold-out due to their popularity." Read more below for the rest of the press release.

markusN writes "GRASS 6.2.1 is a new stable release which fixes several bugs discovered in the 6.2.0 source code. This release is solely for stability purposes and adds no new features. Besides bug fixes it also includes a number of new message translations, updates for the help pages, and will better handle errors caused by missing or incorrectly installed support software. It also introduces a new 3D raster module which was left out of the last release due to time constraints." The rest of the PR below.