Open Source Is More Than a Technology Choice. It’s a Values Choice.

When organizations begin evaluating a new website platform, the conversation usually starts with features. Can our team update content easily? Does it integrate with our CRM? Is it secure? Will it support accessibility? Will it support our SEO/GEO efforts? What’s the cost?

Don’t get me wrong, these are all important questions. But they can overshadow one of the most important considerations of all: Who owns your digital future?

Whether you’re a nonprofit organization or for-profit business, the content management system (CMS) you choose is more than a piece of software. It’s the foundation of your digital presence and one of your organization’s most valuable long-term assets.

At ArcStone, we believe choosing between open-source and proprietary software isn’t simply a technology decision, it’s also a values decision. If that sounds like a bit of a leap, let me explain.

Technology Should Empower, Not Restrict

One of the hidden costs of proprietary software is that you don’t always get to decide when it’s time to invest in your next website.

We’ve worked with quite a few organizations whose CMS was being sunsetted or would no longer be supported. In every instance, the redesign timeline was dictated by the vendor, not by the organization. Projects that should have been carefully planned over months became urgent, deadline-driven initiatives. Budgets had to be reshuffled, internal teams were stretched thin, and strategic opportunities were sacrificed simply because the organization was forced to act on someone else’s schedule. 

We believe organizations should have the freedom to make decisions that serve their mission, rather than the business model or product roadmap of a software vendor. That’s one of the reasons we advocate for open-source platforms like WordPress.

Open source is built around principles we value deeply: collaboration, transparency, community, flexibility, and long-term stewardship. And when we recently asked people around ArcStone what open source meant to them, one theme came through particularly strongly: the value isn’t just that you get to use the software. It’s that everyone gets to build on what came before.

It’s Less “I Own It” and More “We Own It”

We often talk about open source in terms of ownership. Your website is your asset. You can choose your hosting provider, choose your technology partner, change agencies, and customize or extend the platform as your needs change.

That’s all true, but one person on our team made an important distinction: open source is communal. It’s not so much that you own it. It’s that we own it.

With WordPress, for example, you’re using software that’s available under an open-source license. You have the freedom to use it, study it, modify it, and distribute it. You can also contribute to it. There’s a large and active community of developers, designers, accessibility specialists, security researchers, agencies, businesses, and individual contributors who have a stake in making the platform and its ecosystem better.

That’s fundamentally different from software controlled by a single company. The motivation isn’t purely profit. People contribute because they need to solve a problem, because they’ve discovered a better way of doing something, because they care about the project, or simply because they want other people to benefit from what they’ve learned.

Open Source Lets Progress Compound

Another person on our team described open source this way: instead of one organization controlling a project, people from around the world can contribute improvements, fix bugs, add features, learn from one another, and then build on those improvements.

That’s where open source becomes something bigger than software.

Think about how human progress happens. One person figures something out, someone else improves it, and a third person applies it in a way the original inventor never anticipated. The transistor is a great example. That breakthrough helped make integrated circuits possible, which helped make microprocessors possible, which helped make personal computers, smartphones, the internet, and much of our modern digital world possible.

The original discovery matters enormously, but so does what happens afterward. Progress compounds because people don’t have to continually start over.

One of our team members put this much less formally: imagine how much further along humanity would be if we stopped treating every useful piece of knowledge like it was the Krabby Patty secret formula.

It’s funny, but there’s a serious point underneath it. Open source allows someone to solve a problem and gives everyone else the opportunity to start from there, rather than spending years solving the same problem independently behind another locked door. Knowledge accumulates. Ideas get tested and improved. New things become possible because the foundation is already there. That’s a beautiful thing!

Your Website Is an Asset

There’s also a very practical organizational argument for open source.

Imagine building your headquarters on land someone else owns. The building may be beautiful and the lease terms may be favorable today, but the property owner ultimately has significant control over what happens next. They can raise the rent, change the rules, redevelop the property, or decide they want to use it for something else.

That’s essentially the risk organizations accept with many proprietary software platforms. These platforms can offer excellent products, service, and support, but they also place a significant amount of control in the hands of a single vendor. That vendor may determine product direction, licensing costs, feature availability, hosting requirements, support policies, and upgrade schedules.

If those decisions no longer align with your organization’s needs, your choices may be limited or expensive.

Open-source software changes that relationship. With WordPress, you can choose your hosting provider and your technology partner. You can change agencies without necessarily rebuilding your website on another platform. You can extend, customize, and evolve the site as your organization changes. You’re not immune from technology changes, maintenance requirements, or difficult migrations, but your digital strategy isn’t tied as tightly to the decisions of a single software company.

That flexibility creates resilience.

A Community Is Stronger Than a Company

One of the greatest strengths of open source is the community surrounding it. In the WordPress ecosystem, developers, designers, security researchers, accessibility specialists, educators, agencies, nonprofits, businesses, and individual users all contribute in different ways.

That doesn’t mean every open-source project is automatically better than every proprietary product. It does mean that innovation can come from many different places. Someone discovers a security vulnerability and develops a fix. Someone encounters an accessibility problem and improves a component. Someone needs an integration that doesn’t exist and builds it. Other people can then use, test, adapt, and improve that work.

This is what our team kept coming back to when we talked about open source: you can contribute to it. You’re not simply consuming a finished product from a company. You’re part of an ecosystem where improvements can move in both directions.

Transparency Builds Trust

Transparency is another reason we’re drawn to open source. The underlying code can be inspected, tested, questioned, and improved. Problems aren’t automatically hidden simply because they’re inconvenient.

Of course, transparency doesn’t make software perfect. Open-source projects have bugs, security vulnerabilities, disagreements, and governance challenges just like proprietary software companies do. But the underlying model makes scrutiny possible. You don’t have to rely exclusively on one company’s assurance that its technology works as promised; an entire community can examine and challenge it.

For organizations that value accountability and transparency themselves, there’s something appealing about choosing technology built around those same principles.

Stewardship Over Subscription

Open source doesn’t mean websites are free. Successful websites still require thoughtful strategy, user experience design, development, accessibility expertise, security, hosting, maintenance, content, analytics, and continuous improvement.

The difference is where more of that investment can go.

With proprietary software, some portion of your budget will always go toward maintaining the right to use the platform itself. With open source, organizations can put more of that investment toward improving the asset and the experience it provides: better content, better accessibility, better performance, useful integrations, stronger security, and ongoing improvements based on what audiences actually need.

We think of that as stewardship. A website isn’t something you buy once and replace when a vendor tells you it’s time. It’s something you invest in, maintain, learn from, and evolve over time.

Proprietary Platforms Aren’t the Enemy

To be clear, proprietary software has its place. For some organizations, an all-in-one managed platform with bundled hosting, support, software updates, and a tightly controlled ecosystem is exactly the right solution.

Open source comes with responsibilities, too. Someone still needs to maintain the software, monitor security, manage updates, evaluate plugins and integrations, and make good technical decisions. Freedom and flexibility don’t eliminate the need for expertise.

So this isn’t really an argument that proprietary software is bad and open source is good. It’s an argument for thinking beyond the feature comparison when you’re making a technology decision that may affect your organization for the next decade.

How much control do you want over your platform? How portable is your investment? What happens if you want to change partners? What happens if the vendor changes direction? Can you build on the work of a larger community? Can you contribute something back?

Those questions belong in the CMS evaluation process, too.

A Technology Choice That Reflects Your Mission

When we crowdsourced thoughts about open source from people around ArcStone, we heard different versions of the same basic idea. Open source encourages collaboration. It creates communities around shared ideas. It gives people transparency and flexibility. It allows people to contribute rather than simply consume. Most importantly, it allows knowledge and innovation to compound.

One person on our team took that idea beyond software altogether, pointing to the potential of scientific research and other ambitious projects being funded and then made openly available for others to build upon. Imagine more resources going toward projects designed not to create another proprietary advantage, but to expand the pool of knowledge available to everyone.

Or, as they put it: more weird billionaire moonshots for humanity, please.

We can get behind that.

At ArcStone, we don’t recommend open source because it’s trendy, nor do we believe it’s automatically the right answer for every organization. We recommend it because the model reflects values we care about: transparency, accessibility, collaboration, sustainability, freedom, and shared progress.

Technology should give organizations more options, not fewer. It should allow us to learn from one another rather than continually reinventing what someone else has already figured out. And when we make something better, ideally, someone else should be able to start where we left off.

That’s the promise of open source. It’s not simply about owning your digital future. It’s about having a stake in a digital future we’re building together.