There are two ways to start a wordpress blog:

1. Goto wordpress.com and sign up for a free blog. Your blog will reside on wordpress.com. It has limited functionality as determined by the site owners – wordpress.
2. Goto wordpress.org and download the (free) wordpress blogging software to your own website (not free). Your blog will reside on yoursite.com. It has unlimited functionality as determined by the site owner – you.

The wordpress.com solution is more user friendly as wordpress installs and maintains the blog software, the web servers, etc. All you do is blog. You will also receive more traffic due to sharing in the wordpress.com tagspace, as well as a higher google pagerank simply by being on such a big/popular site as wordpress.com. The drawback is less control over how your blog looks and functions, inability to run ads, etc. Essentially you do not really own anything – including your blog – you simply are using a free service provided by the site owners – wordpress.

Installing the wordpress software (downloaded from wordpress.org) on your own website is more powerful – you control how the site looks/functions, you can monetize the site (ads, donations, etc), you can do whatever you want. The downside is you must create a website (domain name, hosting) which is not free (but not that expensive for a typical site) and maintain and configure it (backups, installs, upgrades, etc) – essentially you are not just a blogger but also a website owner and administrator.

Sigh. Nothing is ever as easy as it looks and nothing is ever really “free”.

Wordpress.com is owned by a company called Automattic. Wordpress.org is an open-source commmunity project. Many people are involved in both, and it’s unclear from my research whether or not all of the Wordpress.com core developers are also employees of Automattic. It’s quite possible that they are. (More information here.) In fact, the results of a little googling for phrases such as “contribute to wordpress” suggest that the emphasis is on fixing bugs, not adding features. In other words, a group of people who work at Automattic (whether acting as employees of Automattic, or not) probably control the core development of both Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org. They are using the open-source community to fix the bugs in their product, and in return, they are allowing that community to have unfettered access to the code.

But the truth is that none of that really helps the average non-technical user make a decision about which way to go. So what matters is this:

Wordpress.com is a for-profit venture. They can afford to give free hosting because they are owned by a corporation, and because they charge for premium services. They also greatly limit customizability. (If your blog is hosted on Wordpress.com, you can’t edit the CSS.) This is good for security and standardization, and it also makes it more likely that the average user will eventually want to pay for more features.

Wordpress.org is a non-profit venture in which no money changes hands at all. They don’t charge for hosting, and they also don’t provide hosting, so you have to pay for it yourself. On the other hand, you can customize whatever you want. Or, more likely, you can make use of customizations that other people have created and made available for free.

Also, Ro, as far as I know, neither Wordpress.org nor Wordpress.com officially talks about the “freedom/free beer” dichotomy anywhere. I was just bringing up the concept to make a point, but my use of the terms was correct. More information here

Correction

Wordpress.org And Wordpress.com is the same “organization”

.com is just their hosting platform and .org is where you can download the source to use on your own platform as well as cool add-ons and themes people have made. One is not a different company or organization from the other.

The “freedom” part of their (free) hosting platform means that they are simply giving users the freedom to not need to pay for blog hosting (thought their hosting is limiting..since it is free). The “Free Beer” term is a commonly used term by open source developers. (we made this product free to use and change ..so if you ever meet us then buy us a beer)