Since 2003 Word Press has grown to be the most spread blogging tool in the word, today being used by million of websites and followed by a huge number of people each day. The beginning was a single bit of code to improve the typography of everyday writing and the users were limited to just a few.
WP is an Open Source project, having numerous contributors around the world, meaning that anyone can use it without any charge, so all that is available from this community was created by and for the community.
Word Press is fully customizable and can be used for almost everything, so once you download and install the software you can have your blog or web site functional in minutes. Not more than few year a go, numerous web designers considered WordPress as a CMS more suited for blogs, but now however things have changed. WordPress is able to act as the backbone for all sorts of websites. To see how much it can do, you only have to look at some WordPress themes.
Also there is a service called WordPress.com which allows you get started with a WP blog, but keep in mind that is less flexible than the WordPress software you download and install yourself.
WordPress has evolved to be used as a complete CMS and much more thanks to thousands of plugins, widgets, themes although at it's early beginning it was just a blogging system. WP is now filled with standard features as the features list has grown exponentially during time.
WordPress makes it easy to monetize, whether is with ads, affiliate offers etc. eCommerce and Ads can be handled via a wide range of plugins
WordPress was built on PHP and MySQL and has been licensed under the GPL, being the official successor of b2/cafelog and was born out of a desire for an elegant, good personal publishing system. else out there.