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Abstract
Over the past few years the world of free and open source geospatial software has experienced some major changes. For instance, the website FreeGIS.org currently lists 330 GIS‐related projects. Besides the advent of new software projects and the growth of established projects, a new organisation known as the OSGeo Foundation has been established to offer a point of contact. This paper will give an overview on existing free and open source desktop GIS projects. To further the understanding of the open source software development, we give a brief explanation of associated terms and introduce the two most established software license types: the General Public License (GPL) and the Lesser General Public License (LGPL). After laying out the organisational structures, we describe the different desktop GIS software projects in terms of their main characteristics. Two main tables summarise information on the projects and functionality of the currently available software versions. Finally, the advantages and disadvantages of open source software, with an emphasis on research and teaching, are discussed.
Acknowledgements
Parts of this review have been accomplished by Stefan Steiniger during two research projects founded by the Swiss NSF: DEGEN (project no.: 200020‐116302) and PAGEVIS‐LD (PBZH2‐1211004). We are grateful to the Swiss National Science Foundation for funding. Furthermore, we have to thank numerous people from the different projects for contributing information: GRASS and QGIS: Markus Neteler, Otto Dassau, Marco Hugentobler and Stephan Holl; KOSMO: Manuel Navarro; MapWindow: Daniel Ames, uDig: Jody Garnet and Jesse Eichar, SAGA: Olaf Conrad; ILWIS: Martin Schouwenburg; OpenJUMP: Michaël Michaud, DeeJUMP: Andreas Schmitz; PirolJUMP: Arnd Kielhorn; SkyJUMP: Larry Becker; and gvSIG: Mario Carrera. We would like to thank as well Ralf Tauscher and Jan‐Oliver Wagner for comments and suggestions on foregoing presentation slides and first manuscript versions. Finally, we are grateful to the two anonymous reviewers whose comments helped to improve the paper, and also to Ryan Powers for revising our English.
Notes
1. Data derived from SourceForge.org download statistics, where the SAGA GIS project hosts its downloads.
2. We like to note that the aspect of free geodata is different between the USA and most other countries. Due to the presidential executive order 12906 is public access to geospatial data guaranteed (see section 3c in Clinton 1993). However, the notion of ‘public’ access may be different from the notion ‘free’ as defined in this article.
3. No matter whether the purpose is commercial, educational or research.
4. GNU is a recursive acronym for ‘GNU is not Unix’. Often a caricature of the animal gnu (wildebeest) is used as symbol to refer to free software.
5. The Version 3 of the GPL has been officially released in 2007, but it is less used than version 2.
6. The term “copyleft” has been used already in 1976 by Li‐Chen Wang and Roger Rauskolb (Rauskolb 1976).
8. For a description of Spatial Data Infrastructures, see Nebert (2004).
10. Also the project gvSIG is lead by a company and has mainly Spanish developers. But the gvSIG user base is rather multi‐national and in opposite to KOSMO the gvSIG project focuses on a complete English documentation and offers tutorials in different languages.
11. During the revision of this article, a new Kalypso project was registered on Sourceforge.net and the business related webpage http://kalypso.bjoernsen.de shows some new activities. Kalypso is a simulation platform, developed for the analysis and modeling of water drainage and flood events.
12. See QGIS download statistics and user map, as well as services that provide web‐metrics, such as Alexa.com and Ohloh.net.
13. The JGrass team (www.jgrass.org) focuses on making GRASS functionality available to programs based on the JAVA platform and with it to bring GRASS to production, i.e. mass market, environments as opposed to the research environment.
14. SIGLE (http://www.projet‐sigle.org/): Systèmes et Infrastructures Géographiques LibrEs is an organisation that aims to promote the use of geospatial FOSS within the French speaking GIS community.
15. For a solution based on web services, see Neun (2007).
During the writing of the article, the publication of several books has been announced with a focus on geospatial FOS software and data that we would like to mention for completeness: (1) ‘Desktop GIS: Mapping the Planet with Open Source’ by G.E. Sherman, The Pragmatic Programmers LLC, (2) ‘Open Source Approaches in Spatial Data Handling’ by G.B. Hall and M.G. Leahy, Springer Verlag, (3) ‘Open Source GIS: A GRASS GIS Approach’ by M. Neteler and H. Mitasova, 3rd Ed., Springer Verlag, (4) ‘Web Mapping Illustrated: Using Open Source GIS Toolkits’ by T. Mitchell, A. Emde and A. Christl, revised German Ed, O'Reilly, and (5) ‘OpenStreetMap: Die freie Weltkarte nutzen und mitgestalten’ by F. Ramm and J. Topf, German Ed., Lehmanns Media (English Ed. in preparation).