Glenn Beck’s “The Blaze” Uses WordPress. Shouldn’t Glenn Object?

It struck me as odd Beck would eschew commercially produced software for this more “socialist” platform put together by unpaid volunteers and shepherded by community activists.

Recently Glenn Beck’s website “The Blaze” has gotten well deserved positive publicity. It was The Blaze which revealed James O’Keefe’s NPR “sting” video was edited out-of-context.

I’d never heard of the site much less been on it, but tonight decided to take a look. It’s clean and nicely designed.

It didn’t take long to realize it’s based on WordPress the heavily used free open source blogging/content management system software.

This blog also runs on WordPress as do a bunch of other sites I’ve built. I’m a huge fan. It’s tough not to be.

Still it struck me as odd Beck would eschew commercially produced software for this more “socialist” platform put together by unpaid volunteers and shepherded by community activists. After all:

Everything you see here, from the documentation to the code itself, was created by and for the community. WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it. (More than most commercial platforms.) It also means you are free to use it for anything from your cat’s home page to a Fortune 500 web site without paying anyone a license fee and a number of other important freedoms.

Beck is free to use WordPress. Encouraged is probably a better word.

Ethically should he?

Maybe I’m just simplifying a more complex issue, but WordPress seems the kind of enterprise he’d be against not one he’d embrace.