A few Cadcorp staff were at Géo-événement 2008 last week, in Paris, supporting Geomod, our French VAR. There was also an OSGeo presence at the event, and I’m told that one, ahem, freetard came over to the stand and asked:

Why do you bother having your own web server when you could use MapServer?

Now, I’ve nothing against MapServer, and even helped beta test the WCS implementation many moons ago, but, if it is so good that everyone else is wasting their time then my answer to the freetard is: Physician, heal thyself.

Personally, I think that letting a hundred web mapping servers bloom - open source and proprietary, cost-free and commercial - is good for the users, old and new.