658OSM Outshining GDAL and MapServer?

I meant to write this last week, but ran out of time. Stefano Mazzocchi writes:

My holy grail hiking/exploring map should have points of interests, morphology (contours/rivers/lakes), access roads and trails ... in that order of importance.

The best way, of course, would be to build your own and I did research a bit into ways to do that, but I had to give up pretty early on: there is a lot of software on how to get data in and out of your Garmin but not a lot of freely available mapping data and, worst, there was no community where people would get together and share experience and tools.

Until OpenStreetMap came along, that is.

Actually, the GDAL and MapServer communities were doing this kind of stuff well before OSM started, but it's interesting that a technically savvy person starting from scratch today might find the OSM community first and completely overlook the old timers.