Back in the day, a GIS pro gave a talk at OSCON on how far he could push Open Source software to do mapping for free. One of the best talks I've ever seen, alt

Back in the day, a GIS pro gave a talk at OSCON on how far he could push Open Source software to do mapping for free. One of the best talks I've ever seen, although if you do that much work yourself, you might as well form a company. I consulted for the Canadian JPL, so I had tons of satellite data, but it was mostly ice, tundra and forest regions. Not much urban data, alas. :) Although you could take your notebook down to the Ministry of Works and they would plug in a cable and give you all their street data at the time for free. I actually did that once.