GDAL is a library for reading and writing raster geospatial data
formats, and is released under an X/MIT style Open Source license by
the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. As a library, it presents a
single abstract data model to the calling application for all
supported formats. It may also be built with a variety of useful
command-line utilities for data translation and processing.

The related OGR library (which is part of the GDAL source tree)
provides a similar capability for simple features vector data.

This requires geos and proj.

To include gdal's optional support for grass, rebuild gdal after
grass is installed.  If you don't want grass support, pass
GRASS=no to the script.
