The open-source software (downloaded from wordpress.org, and what you get with a GoDaddy account) is designed to be customized, and that has created a huge third-party market of plugins that in their turn enable an even larger market of civilians to turn out " a reasonable product...without having to touch code with my bare hands".

The guys who make it didn't have to do it that way. Remember TikiWiki? Silly damn question, of course you do. And a large part of why it was so damned awful was that they took the opposite approach, made it a closed system almost entirely dependent on their plugins and very difficult to customize. I was impressed by their library of plugins but didn't consider customizability enough. And me a geek.

Years ago I was skeptical of the concept of open-source software, but WP's an example of a successful split-level approach that melds the idealism and fuzzy math (almost like karma, it'll "pay off someday") with straightforward business: wordpress.com, home of your blog, where they apply their own open-source software, and derive revenue from advertising and premium services...which pays them to continue to develop open-source WordPress. Smart guys, to have invented a perpetual-motion machine like that.