Dear JGrass community, it is now several years that HydroloGIS runs these mailinglists, fills the JGrass website with content, takes care to find a suitable place for the code repositories and creates as often as possible builds of the software.
In all this years the JGrass community has never evolved to a healthy open source community. In fact HydroloGIS answers up to 99% of the mailinglist posts. We also are the only developers on JGrass. HydroloGIS, together with the University of Trento put an incredible effort to migrate the old and fluffy JGrass into the new uDig framework. The community feedback in these years has been too low. We know of lots of professionals using JGrass for their projects, of people that have a great comeback from the use of JGrass, and we are very glad about that. But the JGrass project itself, probably because of its very specific target, almost never got anything back from the community. And we are not talking about money, that is not our aim. We are talking about documentation on usages, documentation of best pratices. We are talking about someone that takes care of the website, someone that helps with releases. We are talking about answering to easy questions in the mailinglist, so that we at least need to take care only of the advanced ones. We are talking about testing new builds and give us some quick feedback. We have a huge amount of work in doing development and releases and often are not precise in doing that because of too much workload on this "volountary" effort. And since we don't like to do things in a bad way, we see ourselves forced to change things. We have not yet decided exactly what we will do, but the most probable thing will be the closing of the mailinglists by the end of this month. Perhaps only the developer's mailinglist may be kept alive, not sure yet. What we are sure right now is that the JGrass mailinglists can't be just a HydroloGIS free customerservice for eveyone. Either this thing gets community driven or we don't have any interest to keep it alive. Obviously the development will go on and is very active at the moment and also the new upcoming manuals for this version will be released on the website when they are ready. We are open to comments and advices. Best regards, Andrea Antonello, JGrass coordinator _______________________________________________ JGrass-devel mailing list JGrass-devel@dev.fsc.bz.it https://dev.fsc.bz.it/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/jgrass-devel
