"Free beer" is free as in speech, not free as in beer.

Open Source Software or Free Open Source Software is free (Latin: liber) as in speech and often free as in beer (Latin: gratis), a gift. The former concept is the most important; it has to do with intellectual property and a lack of restrictive copyrights. The latter concept is much simpler: no charge. A lot of open source software is free in both senses, but the key value comes from sharing the source code (think of it as the "recipe" for software) so that anyone--and inevitably many people--will improve it. It's becoming more common now for commercial entities to sponsor open source projects they initiate or existing projects "grown in the wild."

The upshot of all this freedom is that it is possible at very little or no cost to acquire very sophisticated software that is as good as and often better than proprietary options. The most significant and robust software will continue to be developed and supported over time, with numerous providers selling their services installing, customizing, and adapting the software to customer specifications.

That's the model here, when it comes to web development.

Three open source software brands appear frequently in New Local Media web development projects, and those brands belong to the three most widely used content management systems in the world: Joomla, Wordpress, and Drupal. You can learn more about them here.