An independent group of Microsoft employees have open-sourced a Windows application known as the Live Writer. This program has been in the operating system since 2008 and is now an open-sourced fork for blog writers.
American multinational tech company Microsoft has open-sourced the Windows Live Writer application and will now be known as the Open Live Writer. Although some of the features have been opted out, updated plug-ins and features are soon to come.
The Windows Live Writer was a PC application where its users can write offline blog posts. It also enables its users preview the blog on how it would look like once it is posted on the Internet, and the program comes with a wide range of content managing systems like Blogger and WordPress.
This app has been the tool of choice for recent bloggers since a beta version was released in 2006. However, the app has never found a massive audience due to technological advancements. In addition, no software updates have been offered since 2012. Since then, the Live Writer features have slowly been breaking up.
A group of Microsoft employees wanted to keep the Live Writer alive and had been fighting silently to revive it as an open source project since April 2013. Just recently, the company has given the group the go signal.
Microsoft employee Scott Hanselman wrote in a blog post that a group of independent employees from the company has successfully open-sourced the Windows Live Writer. The team successfully forked a previous proprietary piece of Microsoft's software that was dispatched as part of the Windows Live Essentials.
The Open Live Writer is a C+ programming language fork of the original OS and can now be downloaded for free. In addition, a code from GitHub permits the users to contribute updates and features for the application. Some features of the Live Writer have been removed from their original program like spell check and API. It will be replaced later on by a system-wide tool incorporated on Windows 8 OS or higher operating systems like the Windows X.
