Content management systems (CMS's) used to be very expensive investments, that only large companies were able to implement.  Interwoven implementations used to be $100K at the beginning of a deployment.

A revolution came about when open source CMS tools started appearing about 7 years ago.  These have evolved into very robust platforms that can run small sites and blogs, or enterprise scale systems.

There are some serious benefits when building in open source.  More than being free, cause they usually require customization - The biggest benefit is the development community.  Large open source projects like Drupal, have tens of thousands of developers working in their CMS framework. 

One of the strengths Bear Ideas brings to its clients - besides solid scoping, good planning, interesting design and great code - is the ability to navigate and utilize the open source development community worldwide to accomplish interesting features, and get custom development direct from the people who wrote the source.