G RASS D evelopment T eam

Introduction
The GRASS Development Team is pleased to announce this new home for the open source Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS). GRASS has been under continual development since 1982 and has involved a large number of federal US agencies, universities, and private companies. The core components of GRASS and the management of the integration of the efforts into GRASS releases were accomplished by the Construction Engineering Resesarch Laboratory (CERL) in Champaign, Illinois. CERL completed the last combined release of GRASS as version 4.1 in 1992 and provided updates and patches to this release through 1995. It has been estimated that several million dollars of GRASS software development efforts across the government have been completed since the 4.1 release. Since 1997 GRASS is developed by a consortium of worldwide researcher and programmers at universities and private companies. GRASS GIS is released under GNU General Public License.

Plans
We have several goals for the release of GRASS including:

- We have released GRASS version 4.2.x GRASS 4.2.x consists of the GRASS 4.1 engine with the addition of many new programs that have been submitted by the user community.

- Revamped documentation. In keeping with the tradition of making GRASS available to the greatest audience possible, are releasing new versions of the documentation. The current Users, Programmers, and Installation Guides are currently available in Adobe PDF format.

- The release of version 5.0. Major changes to this version includes support for floating-point numbers and the separation of 0 and null. This version of GRASS generates DIFFERENT grass format files due to the floating and null support.

Current Status
As of December 1997, we have released GRASS 4.2 to the public. GRASS 5 has been released under GPL license in Oktober 1999 and already undergone several beta releases towards GRASS 5.0stable.

The Future of GRASS
Our main goal is to keep GRASS alive and prospering and available to the user community. We hope that the continued interest in GRASS will result in its further development and enhancement.

Researchers

List of authors Other cooperating scientists, groups, and agencies

GRASS Development Team

Address:
GRASS Development Team
U.S. Headquarters (GRASS 4 coordination)
Center for Applied Geographic and Spatial Research
Baylor University
Phone: (254) 710-2361
email: grass@baylor.edu
P.O. Box 97354 Waco, TX 76798
European Headquarters (GRASS 5 coordination)
Institute of Physical Geography-Landscape Ecology
University of Hannover
Schneiderberg 50
30167 Hannover
Germany

Last changed: $Date: 2002/01/25 05:45:32 $