Slashdot Mirror

michaelmalak writes "The annual ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest finished up last week for 2013, but for the first time since its inception in the 1970s, no U.S. college placed in the top 10. Through 1989, a U.S. college won first place every year, but there hasn't been one in first place since 1997. The U.S. college that has won most frequently throughout the contest's history, Stanford, hasn't won since 1991. The 2013 top 10 consists entirely of colleges from Eastern Europe, East Asia, and India."

Jon Larsson writes "Yesterday, the 33rd World Finals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest were held at KTH — The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. World Champions, for the second consecutive year, are the Saint Petersburg State University of IT, Mechanics and Optics. They won in competition with 99 other teams from all six continents — the best of the over 7000 teams participating in the qualifying rounds during the past half year. The full results can be found here and the contest problem set is available here (PDF). For the first time ever, the whole event was broadcast live, both on the web and on national TV in Sweden. The broadcast was produced by media students of KTH and the Lillehammer University College in Norway. The webcast in its entirety (over 7 hours) can be viewed here."

Jon Larsson writes "Yesterday, the 33rd World Finals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest were held at KTH — The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. World Champions, for the second consecutive year, are the Saint Petersburg State University of IT, Mechanics and Optics. They won in competition with 99 other teams from all six continents — the best of the over 7000 teams participating in the qualifying rounds during the past half year. The full results can be found here and the contest problem set is available here (PDF). For the first time ever, the whole event was broadcast live, both on the web and on national TV in Sweden. The broadcast was produced by media students of KTH and the Lillehammer University College in Norway. The webcast in its entirety (over 7 hours) can be viewed here."

Jon Larsson writes "Yesterday, the 33rd World Finals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest were held at KTH — The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. World Champions, for the second consecutive year, are the Saint Petersburg State University of IT, Mechanics and Optics. They won in competition with 99 other teams from all six continents — the best of the over 7000 teams participating in the qualifying rounds during the past half year. The full results can be found here and the contest problem set is available here (PDF). For the first time ever, the whole event was broadcast live, both on the web and on national TV in Sweden. The broadcast was produced by media students of KTH and the Lillehammer University College in Norway. The webcast in its entirety (over 7 hours) can be viewed here."

tarball_tinkerbell sends us to the NY Times for word on a book due out next year that claims that beginning in the late 1990s, on average patents cost companies more than they earned them. A big exception was pharmaceuticals, which accounted for 2/3 of the revenues attributable to patents. The authors of the book Do Patents Work? (synopsis and sample chapters), James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer of the Boston University School of Law, have crunched the numbers and say that, especially in the IT industry, patents no longer make economic sense. Their views are less radical than those of a pair of Washington University at St. Louis economists who argue that the patent system should be abolished outright.

prostoalex writes "2007 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest is over with Warsaw University (Poland) winning it this year and solving all of the problems. The runner-up, Tsinghua University (China), finished with 7 problems solved, while St. Petersburg University of IT, Mechanics and Optics (Russia) and MIT (USA) are tied up for the third place with 6 problems solved. There were 6000 teams initially in the running, and in the final round of the competition only 88 remained."

prostoalex writes "2007 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest is over with Warsaw University (Poland) winning it this year and solving all of the problems. The runner-up, Tsinghua University (China), finished with 7 problems solved, while St. Petersburg University of IT, Mechanics and Optics (Russia) and MIT (USA) are tied up for the third place with 6 problems solved. There were 6000 teams initially in the running, and in the final round of the competition only 88 remained."

prostoalex writes "World finals for 2006 ACM programming contest took place in San Antonio, TX this year, and the results are in. Russia's Saratov State University solved 5 contest problems in record time, followed closely by Altai State Technical University (Russia) with 5 problems solved as well. University of Twente (Netherlands), Shanghai Jiao Tong University (China), Warsaw University (Poland), St. Petersburg State University (Russia), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), Moscow State University (Russia), University of Waterloo (Canada) and Jagiellonian University - Krakow (Poland) all completed 4 problems."

mathinator writes "The 29th ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals, hosted by China's Shanghai Jiao Tong University, are now over and the results are in. Congratulations to the top 4 teams who will be walking away with gold medals. They are Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Moscow State University, St. Petersburg Institute of Optics and Mechanics, and Canada's University of Waterloo (coming in at 1, 2, 3, 4 respectively. The top 4 get gold medals). Regional champions are: University of Waterloo, Canada (North America); Moscow State University, Russia (Europe); University of Cape Town, South Africa, (Africa and the Middle East); Instituto Tecnologico de Aeronautica, Brazil (Latin America); Shanghai Jiaotong University, China (Asia); and University of New South Wales, Australia (South Pacific)."

An Ominous Coward asks: "The University of Florida student chapter of ACM hosts a yearly programming competition for students throughout the state of Florida. It is based on the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, and for the past ten years has been very successful, currently drawing a crowd in the hundreds. However, this year was the first we had a problem with wireless networks. We doubt that cheating was the intention, as no one had SSID broadcasting turned off (as far as we know). Wireless networking gear is quite inexpensive now. And while we don't believe it affected the contest this year, we would like to take precautions for future contests. Is there any way to disable all wireless networking in an area about the size of a large lecture hall?"

Slob Nerd writes "The finals for this years ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals have just finished. And the winner is... St. Petersburg Institute of Fine Mechanics and Optics! Full results here, and details on all teams here. A pdf of the problems is also available. Congrats to all involved."

Slob Nerd writes "The finals for this years ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals have just finished. And the winner is... St. Petersburg Institute of Fine Mechanics and Optics! Full results here, and details on all teams here. A pdf of the problems is also available. Congrats to all involved."

Slob Nerd writes "The finals for this years ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals have just finished. And the winner is... St. Petersburg Institute of Fine Mechanics and Optics! Full results here, and details on all teams here. A pdf of the problems is also available. Congrats to all involved."

Slob Nerd writes "The finals for this years ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals have just finished. And the winner is... St. Petersburg Institute of Fine Mechanics and Optics! Full results here, and details on all teams here. A pdf of the problems is also available. Congrats to all involved."

Slob Nerd writes "The finals for this years ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals have just finished. And the winner is... St. Petersburg Institute of Fine Mechanics and Optics! Full results here, and details on all teams here. A pdf of the problems is also available. Congrats to all involved."

An anonymous submitter writes: "Warsaw University has won the 2003 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest with nine of ten problems solved. Second to fifth place are Moscow State University, St Petersburg Institute of Fine Mechanics and Optics, Comenius University, Tsinghua University. You can view the problems online, as well as the final standings. Congratulations to all!"

An anonymous submitter writes: "Warsaw University has won the 2003 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest with nine of ten problems solved. Second to fifth place are Moscow State University, St Petersburg Institute of Fine Mechanics and Optics, Comenius University, Tsinghua University. You can view the problems online, as well as the final standings. Congratulations to all!"

thirty-seven writes "The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest world finals are being held today, at 8:30am local time in Beverly Hills. But before the "real" contest started, the teams got to have some fun competing in the Java Challenge, where the teams write Java programs that directly compete against each other in a simulated environment. Although it was a big secret ahead of time, a pdf on the site now reveals that this year's Challenge was writing a program to drive a race car in a simulated demolition derby. No official results have been released yet, but according to their coach, the University of Waterloo team came in third overall after a slow start."

thirty-seven writes "The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest world finals are being held today, at 8:30am local time in Beverly Hills. But before the "real" contest started, the teams got to have some fun competing in the Java Challenge, where the teams write Java programs that directly compete against each other in a simulated environment. Although it was a big secret ahead of time, a pdf on the site now reveals that this year's Challenge was writing a program to drive a race car in a simulated demolition derby. No official results have been released yet, but according to their coach, the University of Waterloo team came in third overall after a slow start."

thirty-seven writes "The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest world finals are being held today, at 8:30am local time in Beverly Hills. But before the "real" contest started, the teams got to have some fun competing in the Java Challenge, where the teams write Java programs that directly compete against each other in a simulated environment. Although it was a big secret ahead of time, a pdf on the site now reveals that this year's Challenge was writing a program to drive a race car in a simulated demolition derby. No official results have been released yet, but according to their coach, the University of Waterloo team came in third overall after a slow start."

Many people have noted that there has been a reaction (see also this AP story) to the story posted a few days ago about the GPL in government. (More links: Wired, Newsforge.) This is good, I guess: Congress should consider carefully how the government licenses the code it funds, because it's an important public policy question: it shouldn't be decided by a backroom push from business lobbyists (the lead Representative listed, Adam Smith, represents a district fairly close to but not including Microsoft headquarters). There are certain things that bother me about this whole story though, and I'm going to try to trace the trajectory of it below.

As far as I can tell, it started with this Newsforge story (Newsforge is also part of OSDN, Slashdot's corporate parent). The Newsforge story was excerpted and copied by an Australian newspaper, and from there, it was off and spreading. The headline chosen, "Washington State Congressman attempts to outlaw GPL", is not particularly accurate, but it did a great job at stirring up outrage. Outlaw the GPL! Over my dead keyboard!

From there it really started making the rounds. It was repeatedly submitted to Slashdot with all sorts of flaming, incorrect commentary - in fact, after reading a dozen different submissions, I didn't think any of them were even close to accurate. I picked one and posted it, trying to do my best to a) provide an accurate headline and b) provide an accurate summary of the issue at stake in a few sentences. To recap again: when the Federal government creates computer code (or any copyrightable work) directly, it gets no copyright whatsoever and the work is true public domain (quirk of the U.S. copyright laws - the 50 states, corporations, individuals, and other legal entities all get copyrights automatically, but the Federal government does not). If you want to copy, reproduce, or sell an .mp3 of the U.S. Congress singing "God Bless America" after September 11, go right ahead: there is no copyright on it whatsoever. (Actually, the song itself is still under copyright, but Congress' performance of it wouldn't be...)

However, when the Federal government hires a non-employee to create code or copyrighted works, there is no clear rule regarding the copyright status of the work. Sometimes the contract calls for rights to the work to be assigned to the Federal government (the Feds don't get original copyrights, but if someone else gets an original copyright, the Feds can acquire it). Sometimes the contractor keeps the copyright and gets to do whatever they want with it. Sometimes the contract doesn't specify. Note that this is NOT a BSD-vs.-GPL dispute, not by a long shot. Very little code financed by the Federal government is ever licensed under either of these two licenses - the choice is basically agency-proprietary (the Federal agency asked for the rights in the contract, and kept them) or company-proprietary (the agency didn't ask for the rights, and the contractor kept them).

And most of the time it doesn't matter. I've written code for the Federal government as both a contractor and an employee, and 99% of it was so specific and customized that it would be of use to no one else, regardless of its licensing or copyright status. Probably the majority of code written for the Federal government falls into that category - internal use software for very specific needs.

But some of it is undoubtedly useful. Some major projects funded by the government in conjunction with academia have escaped from licensing purgatory, typically through the efforts of the researchers working on them who approach the issue from an academic freedom viewpoint and want to see their work widely adopted. GRASS is one major one that I know of. A commenter pointed out ADA as an example. For code which is useful to others, either a BSD-like or GPL-like license would be truly beneficial and easily defensible as a public policy choice. In the non-code world, the government makes choices like that all the time - it might choose to purchase a particular piece of land and commit to making it available to everyone forever by declaring it a National Park and committing to maintain it, a GPL-like philosophy; alternately, it might choose to just dump a particular piece of property on the market, putting it up for auction and letting the purchaser do what he wills with it, a BSD-like philosophy.[1] Either of these two options might be optimal; but paying for code which ends up remaining proprietary is like buying a new stadium to benefit a very specific corporation which owns a very specific sports team: the type of use of public funds which is generally seen as sleazy and the opposite of good governance.

Either of the first two choices can be appropriate in certain situations. What does not seem appropriate is paying for proprietary code, although this is generally what happens when the government contracts for code. Since the government has the ability to provide a benefit to the public (open code) at essentially zero cost, it should do so. An example which has struck me several times over the past few years: every airport in the world has the same problem, coordinating planes taking off and landing and keeping them from running into each other. Yet each nation (and often each airport) solves the problem over and over, paying heavily for custom-designed, one-shot software development. Imagine if the world's airports could simply install GNU-AirTrafficControl 2.7, and have a complete, working, bug-free and cost-free air traffic control system. It would cost every nation less to do it this way, but it would also make a lot less money for the consultants retained to develop these systems.

But leave off the advocacy for moment - I was following the story itself. As noted above, the outcry has prompted many of the other Representatives who originally signed the letter to reconsider. The AP story even suggests that some of the signatories were actively misled - that the letter they thought they were signing didn't mention the GPL at all. However it actually played out, some good has been done.

That's good. What's not so good is that much of the outcry was probably generated by stories titled "Washington State Congressman attempts to outlaw GPL". The right outcome occurred, but for the wrong reasons and in the wrong manner. I am left wondering whether the community would have made the same sort of response on this issue if every story that had been posted about it was 100% accurate and non-inflammatory.

[1] If you're not familiar with the BSD-like and GPL-like classes of software licenses, this won't make a lot of sense to you, so please read up if necessary.

Ustaad asks: "We are running some sort of a club in our University which has members who are interested in programming and related stuff. With many sites like TopCoder and Valladolid Online Judge providing heavy machinery practice equipments to programmers, the level of competition in programming contests like ACM ICPC have gone really high. However, we are finding it really difficult to motivate new entries to join our club. There are few key questions that we face from our members. Firstly, how important are these programming contest techniques for solving the real-world industrial problems? Secondly, Do employers really care about the achievements in programming contests while recruiting? And thirdly, what other advantages does one gain by venturing into these contests?"

An anonymous submitter writes: "Shanghai Jiao Tong University has won the 2002 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest with six of nine problems solved. Also solving six problems were MIT (2nd), University of Waterloo (3rd), Tsinghua University (4th), and Stanford University (5th). You can view the problems online, as well as the final standings. Congratulations to all!"

An anonymous submitter writes: "Shanghai Jiao Tong University has won the 2002 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest with six of nine problems solved. Also solving six problems were MIT (2nd), University of Waterloo (3rd), Tsinghua University (4th), and Stanford University (5th). You can view the problems online, as well as the final standings. Congratulations to all!"

An anonymous submitter writes: "Shanghai Jiao Tong University has won the 2002 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest with six of nine problems solved. Also solving six problems were MIT (2nd), University of Waterloo (3rd), Tsinghua University (4th), and Stanford University (5th). You can view the problems online, as well as the final standings. Congratulations to all!"

djmcmath asks: "Does anyone have any experience with Open Source Software and/or GPL'd software in military applications? I'm only asking because I'm involved in work on the combat systems for a new submarine, and had considered an Open Source solution. (I apologize, I must be intentionally vague for obvious reasons.) So ignore the obvious questions (Is it really suitable? Are closed-source proprietary options better? Does MS have a good solution?) and skip to the good stuff. What about the fact that my code would be classified Secret under US Code Umptifratz? I cannot distribute my code (and it's changes) without being tried for treason. What happens to the rest of the combat system code when I submit my GPL'd module?" Open Source and the Military: it's a tricky combination of keeping what can be open, open and keeping your secrets...well, secrets! However, open source in the military need not be as high profile as weapons systems. One of the only major OS projects that I'm aware of that had any form of military involvement was GRASS, the open-source GIS system. I'm sure there may be a few others out there. Does anyone know of other OS projects with military association? If there are any projects out there that interface with classified bits, how did you deal with those issues?

Tonight: Reactions and reductions of previous Slashdot appearances, including but not limited to: in-dash video gaming for the less upwardly mobile; a CSS descrambler you could scratch as a crib onto the side of your #2 pencil; and more on the engineers vs. scientists brouhaha. Enjoy!

I like the driving game in front of the windshield. Not everyone has the cash or the gumption to outfit his Macintosh with a Pathfinder; for the computationally experimental on a more modest budget, there is an easier way. wing_king writes: "A fellow named Troy Kellogg managed to hack an actual Atari 2600 console into the dashboard of his 1978 Volkswagen. The "AtariMobile" even has controller ports and a screen built right into the dash! The AtariMobile site has some pictures of the unit and some details on its construction. What a way to kill all that time sitting at stoplights."

Please tell me this is only for passengers and while parked, ok? I own one of these micro televisions, and it seems like playing on a screen that size while hunched over the stickshift might constitute more work than this labor-intensive project took in the first place. Wow.

Stir, reduce and simmer, stir in indignation: Aimster has removed the Pig Latin Encoder software from its site. And if that wasn't enough trivial encoding for you ...

If just over 500 bytes still wasn't small enough for your new MPAA-mocking tattoo, note that the famous Content Scramble System most famously De-flated with DeCSS has fallen anew.

PotatoNO writes: "Charles H. Hannum has created an even smaller DeCSS decoder than the perl script posted a few days ago. This one is written in C and takes 442 bytes, beating the perl script by 30 bytes. It's small and in C, so of course it's speedy. Hannum's program can decode in excess of 21.5MBps which is faster than the DVD spec allows for. That means it can actually be used for realtime playback."

Now hold on a goldarned minute there! William Evans, of Clark University's Dept. of Computer Science, took issue with the report Tuesday night in which drhpbaldy wrote: "At the latest ACM meeting, scientists and engineers threw mud at computer scientists for not contributing anything useful."

Wrote Evans in response:

"There seems to be some confusion as to what computer science is, and who computer scientists are. Programmers and other IT workers are not, for the most part, computer scientists--they're programmers and other IT workers. This is by no means disparaging, but simply a delineation based on definition.

Computer scientists study the branch of mathematics dealing with computation.

In the terms of your story, it was perhaps 'computer scientists' throwing mud at 'programmers and other IT professionals.' In actuality, though, it was mud thrown at business executives, and the ages-old indictment of the larger culture of western corporate management."

What medal do you get for 11th? ;) Rathnor writes: "I've spent the last week or so in Vancouver, Canada in the lead up to the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World finals. I'm a reserve in the University of NSW Team from Australia. Its been a great week with lots of cool things done for us from IBM and UPE.

The results are officially out and presented: The winners were: St Petersberg State University Second place: Virginia Tech the rest of the standings can be found here. (We made 11th)"

Tonight: Reactions and reductions of previous Slashdot appearances, including but not limited to: in-dash video gaming for the less upwardly mobile; a CSS descrambler you could scratch as a crib onto the side of your #2 pencil; and more on the engineers vs. scientists brouhaha. Enjoy!

I like the driving game in front of the windshield. Not everyone has the cash or the gumption to outfit his Macintosh with a Pathfinder; for the computationally experimental on a more modest budget, there is an easier way. wing_king writes: "A fellow named Troy Kellogg managed to hack an actual Atari 2600 console into the dashboard of his 1978 Volkswagen. The "AtariMobile" even has controller ports and a screen built right into the dash! The AtariMobile site has some pictures of the unit and some details on its construction. What a way to kill all that time sitting at stoplights."

Please tell me this is only for passengers and while parked, ok? I own one of these micro televisions, and it seems like playing on a screen that size while hunched over the stickshift might constitute more work than this labor-intensive project took in the first place. Wow.

Stir, reduce and simmer, stir in indignation: Aimster has removed the Pig Latin Encoder software from its site. And if that wasn't enough trivial encoding for you ...

If just over 500 bytes still wasn't small enough for your new MPAA-mocking tattoo, note that the famous Content Scramble System most famously De-flated with DeCSS has fallen anew.

PotatoNO writes: "Charles H. Hannum has created an even smaller DeCSS decoder than the perl script posted a few days ago. This one is written in C and takes 442 bytes, beating the perl script by 30 bytes. It's small and in C, so of course it's speedy. Hannum's program can decode in excess of 21.5MBps which is faster than the DVD spec allows for. That means it can actually be used for realtime playback."

Now hold on a goldarned minute there! William Evans, of Clark University's Dept. of Computer Science, took issue with the report Tuesday night in which drhpbaldy wrote: "At the latest ACM meeting, scientists and engineers threw mud at computer scientists for not contributing anything useful."

Wrote Evans in response:

"There seems to be some confusion as to what computer science is, and who computer scientists are. Programmers and other IT workers are not, for the most part, computer scientists--they're programmers and other IT workers. This is by no means disparaging, but simply a delineation based on definition.

Computer scientists study the branch of mathematics dealing with computation.

In the terms of your story, it was perhaps 'computer scientists' throwing mud at 'programmers and other IT professionals.' In actuality, though, it was mud thrown at business executives, and the ages-old indictment of the larger culture of western corporate management."

What medal do you get for 11th? ;) Rathnor writes: "I've spent the last week or so in Vancouver, Canada in the lead up to the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World finals. I'm a reserve in the University of NSW Team from Australia. Its been a great week with lots of cool things done for us from IBM and UPE.

The results are officially out and presented: The winners were: St Petersberg State University Second place: Virginia Tech the rest of the standings can be found here. (We made 11th)"

Bill Phu asks: "I just had an idea for an interesting open source and/or freeware add-on (for a commercial package). While on the crappy bus ride to work this morning, I just realized that car-pooling would be a much better idea, but finding people to carpool with is a pain in the butt. But the chances of someone living near you increases if the organization (e.g. company or university) is larger. Wouldn't it be great if there was a tool to help you find people to carpool with?" Read on for the details on this idea and tell us what you think.

"My idea is to create a program (or a free web service?) that would help you find people to carpool with to/from work. Traditional bulletin boards are a pain. What would be better if there was a database of streets and people who want to carpool. People would (voluntarily) list themselves into the database, and if they have a car that they can carpool with or not. The program would sort out, geographically, a list of eveyrone else in the database that lives near other potential carpool users, or within a specified distance along the path to/from work.

E.g. If you are looking for a drive, you could list all potential drivers within, say, 1 km of where you live. People with cars can list people who need a drive within 1 km of where they live, or within 500 m of their path to work.

I know there are several packages available commercially that could do the hard calculations easily. They tend to be pricey GIS packages, although there are freeware ones out there e.g. GRASS; or cheap ones like Idrisi (although idrisi doesn't handle topology very well, I don't think..). What does not exist, at least not that I know of, is software to geo-encode addresses to geographic locations (e.g. so an address like 7071 Mumford Road could be translated into a reliable spot on a map). Also, I cannot think of a public streets database that is useable (I wonder if the HRM will license it free to students to work with?).

So would any of you guys know of a geo-encoding tool or any other software that can do this?"

Goonie writes: "After the controversy over the results of the ACM programming competition, it appears that the results are being revised. Check out the new standings. The winner hasn't changed, but some teams have moved up the rankings." Actually, from the look of the page at 4:15GMT this morning, "final rankings are under review." Let's hope the fairest decisions prevail, and that all involved are gracious.

Nyerp writes "The final results for the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest are up. Cheers for St. Petersberg State U, followed by my own school, the Univerity of Waterloo!" Congratulations, guys! I wonder if any of the world finalists used Pascal, since it's allowed.

Spatialy Challenged writes "The GRASS Geographic Information System (originally developed by the US Army Corps of Engineers) is actively being developed and has now been released under the GPL. GRASS has a good core architecture, but is missing the interoperability and GUI features of commercial desktop GIS. I would sure like to see this software evolve into a KDE/Gnome GUI plus OpenGIS CORBA/SQL/COM interoperability. I'm sure it has the potential to blow the socks off of the big commercial names. "

GRASS 5.0 will be released on Febuary 1st, the Baylor University GRASS web site reports GRASS is a public-domain raster-based/vector Geographical Information System which processes images, models spatial data producing images. Source-code for Grass is provided, and it should be useful to environmentalists and people using the GPL'd Tiger Line Data set. There are quite a few demos of it on the web.

GRASS 5.0 will be released on Febuary 1st, the Baylor University GRASS web site reports GRASS is a public-domain raster-based/vector Geographical Information System which processes images, models spatial data producing images. Source-code for Grass is provided, and it should be useful to environmentalists and people using the GPL'd Tiger Line Data set. There are quite a few demos of it on the web.

GRASS 5.0 will be released on Febuary 1st, the Baylor University GRASS web site reports GRASS is a public-domain raster-based/vector Geographical Information System which processes images, models spatial data producing images. Source-code for Grass is provided, and it should be useful to environmentalists and people using the GPL'd Tiger Line Data set. There are quite a few demos of it on the web.