Sorry for the previous blank post. Open source is a great boon to small business innovation, as others have pointed out. Anyone dependent on small business consulting/contracting will have plenty of uses for open source tools.
I have also used Jump in place of ArcView for shp viewing (as well as FWTools, Tatuk, AutoCAD, uDig, Geoserver ...). Shp seems to have become largely a lowest common denominator interchange format with support available all over. Of course ArcGIS/ArcInfo is a much different beast. It would take a good bit of sophistication to beat it in breadth of spectrum with just a single tool. There seems to be some kind of open source tool for most of the Arc bandwidth so you can probably get by without an expensive license with a little extra work. randy -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Landon Blake Sent: Thursday, April 24, 2008 2:36 PM To: OSGeo Discussions Subject: RE: [OSGeo-Discuss] Can I do the same GIS tasks with OS (as with ESRI)? A convert! Welcome Jennifer. I can't speak for GRASS, but I know that OpenJUMP (http://jump-pilot.sourceforge.net/OpenJUMP.html) could be compared to the old 3.X Arcview. It has limited printing abilities at this point in time, but I don't think there is a better cross-platform tool for basic ESRI Shapefile manipulation. (I'm a volunteer on the project and therefore biased in my opinion on this matter.) I think you will find you can do 95% of what you could with ESRI software, you'll just have to do it with an assortment of tools instead of a single tool. Landon -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jennifer Horsman Sent: Thursday, April 24, 2008 12:41 PM To: OSGeo Discussions Subject: [OSGeo-Discuss] Can I do the same GIS tasks with OS (as with ESRI)? The thread that was started today with the subject "Your open source career" got me thinking about asking a question that has been rolling around in my head. This is pointed at those people who have experience with ESRI products as well as OS GIS products. I have been a long-time user of ESRI products, but I want to start my own contract business and will not be able to afford the license for ArcGIS/ArcInfo. So I recently set up a Linux box with GRASS installed, but it has been over 10 years since I have used GRASS (it has probably changed since then too!) Does GRASS have the same analysis and display capabilities as ArcGIS? I know this is a very general question, so perhaps another question would be where does GRASS fall short and where does it excel in comparison to the ESRI products? Thanks, Jennifer _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss Warning: Information provided via electronic media is not guaranteed against defects including translation and transmission errors. If the reader is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this information in error, please notify the sender immediately. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss