The Open Website Alliance forms
Industry Insights
The world’s most trusted open-source content management systems—TYPO3, Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress—have formally united under a new initiative: the Open Website Alliance. Together, they represent the CMS technologies powering nearly half of the web.
This leadership-level alliance was created to strengthen cooperation between major open-source CMS communities and to advocate for open, democratic, and decentralised web technologies in an increasingly proprietary digital landscape.
One Shared Vision, Many Communities
At its heart, the Open Website Alliance is about more than software. It’s a collective stand for transparency, interoperability, and public access to digital infrastructure. The founding members believe that choosing open-source solutions—over locked-in, closed-source alternatives—creates better long-term outcomes for governments, organisations, and the public.
The alliance’s purpose is clear: champion open-source as the default choice for website projects, support the communities that sustain these platforms, and promote the open web as a space for participation, innovation, and inclusion.
Strategic Alignment at the Top
This isn’t just a symbolic partnership. The Alliance brings together the leadership bodies behind each CMS project, enabling aligned decision-making, knowledge sharing, and coordinated advocacy efforts. The presidency rotates among the members, and all decisions are made by consensus—mirroring the values of the software they create.
Already, the group has jointly addressed digital policy concerns with international bodies, such as the European Union, positioning open-source software as a foundational layer of public digital infrastructure.
Backing the Ecosystem That Supports the Web
The Open Website Alliance also aims to support the wider open-source ecosystem—not just the CMS platforms themselves, but also the many upstream tools and libraries they rely on. This holistic view reinforces a shared commitment to the health, safety, and sustainability of the open web.
Why This Matters
At Ocular, we’ve long worked with open-source technologies like TYPO3 because of their flexibility, accountability, and strong community support. We also believe in the values that underpin them: freedom of choice, transparency, and collaboration across borders and industries.
The formation of the Open Website Alliance reinforces why open-source matters—and why it’s not just a technical choice, but an ethical and strategic one.