Free GIS!

As we all know there are quite a few behemoths that churn out GIS/RS softwares with huge green tags. I dont have any complaints about those products, i agree they are one of *the* best and stable envoronments availabole for performing any kind of spatial analysis.

But there is very huge need for free source or low priced softwares that could do the work for us. Last time when i was present at one of the geospatial conferences, one woman came up to me asked me if there was any kind of software that has most of the features that ArcView, but with a small price tag! She has tried the ArcExplorer from ESRI, but it doesnt really let her do any kind of analysis as it is more of a dataviewer.

I wasnt quite to sure what to advice her, i said she can try GRASS as it was the only free source software that is very stable and can out perform most of the other GIS softwares that come for a price.

I have tried other platforms such as JUMP and i wasnt really impressed, they are still basic in terms of functionality but definitely a great attempt to provide every one with a tool free of cost. Over the last few months i’ve seen quite a few free tools for perfoming various kinds of spatial analysis and other geospatial processes.

I am going to share all those links so that you guys out there can just click and surf to download those great tools. Toady i came accross couple more interesting tools from one of my old friends, honestly these tools are just awesome! I still wonder how people get that much of time and patience to create such great tools. Kudos to all those great programmers, people, managers and users that have helped make these projects a reality.

Here goes the list

• Listing of free source GIS softwares http://www.freegis.org/, you can find a variety of tools and full blown softwares to performs GIS analysis.
• The greatest and the most stable free source GIS/RS platform http://grass.itc.it/
• of course they do have something to offer for us ! www.esri.com/arcexplorer
• A great free tool for teaching, performing remote sensing analysis http://www.soc.soton.ac.uk/bilko/
• open source mapping platform and toolkit http://openmap.bbn.com/
  This is one of he most innovative packages i’ve ever found, just download the image(iso) file create a bootable CD, fire it up from boot disk….it will start up a LINUX based OS with fully functional GIS/RS softwares ready to use ..damn!!!! try it http://www.sourcepole.com/sources/software/gis-knoppix/
• PostgreSQL is a highly-scalable, SQL compliant, open source object-relational database management system that could be used for creating and managing geospatial databases http://www.postgresql.org/

I will keep on adding more stuff as i find more intersting ones, i come accross so many literally that cant keep track of them! Please feel free to add anything that i missed here or or drop me a line if you find anything erroneous or for questions.
once again thanks to all those great folks who develop these free systems. Until then enjoy these free goodies and stop complaining that there isnt anything free for spatial analysis..keep rocking!