Tired of outrageously expensive software to launch web-mapping applications? Tyler Mitchell discusses how you can obtain all the tools you need to develop all kinds of GIS applications, for free, in this article  in Directions Magazine. However, there are drawbacks to Open Source software. You may have to sacrifice your free time to learn how to install and configure all the necessary components to get some of these GIS applications to work. I downloaded MapServer several months ago and I haven't had enough time to get it up and running on my Suse Linux machine. If you have time and patience (who's got that?), Open Source might work out for you.