As some of you may know my day job is writing real world geography software and since that is relevant to the Guild I hope you'll forgive a bit of shameless advertising:

Version 4.1 of OpenGeo Suite has been released. Probably the most useful thing for Guild members is that we're providing MacOS and Windows installers for QuantumGIS so you can install it easily. The Suite QGIS plugin then lets you connect QGIS to the server components of OpenGeo Suite so you can serve up maps on the web. More details including links to download for Windows, MacOS, Ubuntu, and CentOS are available here

This is real world GIS software used for real world maps and available for free; in fact it's Open Source. We make money by selling enterprise features and support service, so if you don't need that, we are happy to see you using it for free and increasing the visibility and familiarity with our software.