by , 2:00 PM EDT, June 26th, 2008

OpenOSX is celebrating seven years in business by releasing version 6.3.0 of the free Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS) for Mac OS X. In addition, the OpenOSX GrassPro bundle includes additional tools and support.

OpenOSX Grass is a standalone application which is incorporated in a major new version of the flagship "GrassPro" product, that in addition to OpenOSX Grass, brings major new versions and features of the bundled software.

GRASS (Geographic Resources Analysis Support System) GIS is one of the 10 largest open source projects in history, and OpenOSX has it built it with practically every option enabled, all in a single Mac OS X standalone application. GRASS 6.3.0 is available for free and immediate download.

"This is the only standalone version of GRASS GIS available for any platform to the best of our knowledge," said Jeshua Lacock with OpenOSX.

Mr. Lacock added that the GRASS version 6.3.0 contains about 3,400 fixes, major and minor improvements, according to the development team. This version represents nearly two years of development over the previous GRASS 6.2 version and is considered a preview release of GRASS 6.4 -- although with such numerous improvements it has been recommended over the 6.2 version for production work.

To complement the free "OpenOSX Grass" application, OpenOSX offers its PowerPC and Intel native "OpenOSX GrassPro" product, that, in addition to OpenOSX Grass, includes OpenOSX MapServer which is a complete, standalone application based on Apache 2.2.8, PHP 5.2.6, PostGIS 1.3.3 and MapServer 5.0.3.

MapServer is often used for readily publishing dynamic, navigatable maps, complete with configurable layers over the Internet, directly from dozens of popular geo-spatial file formats including GRASS and Postgres; OpenOSX Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) featuring more than 60 tools for rich manipulation of geographic and Cartesian datasets, including advanced filtering, trending, gridding, projection and much more with EPS file format output; PostGIS which enables spatial, geographic support for the included PostgreSQL (similar to ESRI's Spatial Data Engine [SDE] and Oracle's Spatial Extension); ?along with an exhaustive set of additional software and tools included to extend the power of GRASS GIS.

OpenOSX Grass Pro is backed with documentation, tutorials, sample-data and limited installation support.

The OpenOSX GrassPro bundle is available immediately and priced at US$60.00 delivered on CD-ROM. A download-only version is priced at US$50.00.