Live Writer is now Open Source
Windows Live Writer has been turning blogging up to 11 since 2007, but since 2012 things have been a bit quiet with the application itself. However over the past few months I have had the pleasure working with a very pasionate group of engineers volunteering their time to ensure that Live Writer has a sustainable future. I'm pleased to announce that today the .NET Foundation welcomes a new project - Open Live Writer. One of the great things about Live Writer has always been the passionate community behind it and I can't wait to see what that community does now everying is open source and on GitHub.
In this guest post from Rob Dolin, he explains more about the new project and how to get started with the new, Open Live Writer which is available to download now.
-- Martin
Windows Live Writer Released as the open source Open Live Writer
It’s a great day for bloggers who have a favorite tool for creating content. Today Microsoft announced that Open Live Writer was released and has been contributed to the .NET Foundation. Open Live Writer is an open source application enabling users to author, edit, and publish blog posts. It is based on a fork of the well-loved but not actively developed Windows Live Writer code. Scott Hanselman helped carry the torch at Microsoft on this project, and I’ve been proud to be part of the all-volunteer team to make it happen.
History of Windows Live Writer
The product that became Live Writer was originally created by a small, super-talented team of engineers including Jeremy Allaire, JJ Allaire, Joe Cheng, Charles Teague, and Spike Washburn. The team joined Microsoft through an acquisition in 2006 and organized with the Spaces team where I was working. Becky Pezely joined the team and over time, the team grew and shipped many popular releases of Windows Live Writer.
As Microsoft was planning for the version of Windows Live that would coincide with the Windows 8 operating system release, the teams that built the Windows Live client apps for Windows were encouraged to focus on building a smaller set of Windows 8 apps designed to work well with both traditional PC input mechanisms and touch. The original team concluded their work on Windows Live Writer with Windows Live Writer 2012.
Reviving Live Writer
Even though there was no active development, Windows Live Writer continued to be a favorite tool of a passionate community of Windows PC users for authoring, editing, and publishing blog posts. Data from WordPress.com at the time suggested that Windows Live Writer (even two years after active development ended) was the #1 app for authoring a blog post to WordPress.com on a Windows PC. In fact, some of our technical evangelists were actively using Windows Live Writer for publishing on WordPress-powered blogs. A few team members from my former MS Open Tech team took an early interest in joining Scott Hanselman to revive Live Writer as an open source project.
By January 2015, a group of about a half-dozen engineers interested in spending some of their volunteer time to help release an updated version of Live Writer had found each other. Jon Gallant sent an email to a few large group email lists at Microsoft soliciting volunteers and we collected about 50 people interested in helping. Anne Legato, Ed Essey, and the team at The Garage were most helpful in sharing advice on launching external projects. Scott Guthrie also agreed to be Open Live Writer’s sponsor.
Why v0.5
You might wonder why we’re releasing a version 0.5 now instead of waiting to get to a v0.9 or a v1.0. A few considerations went into this. First, we wanted to get this out as an open source project as quickly as possible so people outside of Microsoft could start participating. Second, we suspect many people may be taking some vacation around the end of December and we wanted to make sure the project was available. Third, Eddie Kessler and the folks on Google’s Blogger team asked us to ship no later than early December 2015 so they could turn-off an old API that Windows Live Writer was dependent on. Eddie and team originally had planned to turn-off the API earlier and we are thankful for their collaboration and partnership in extending its life until we could release Open Live Writer.
Why .NET Foundation
The volunteer team considered a few options for releasing Open Live Writer. Ultimately, we found a great partnership in the .NET Foundation to support our goals around growing community participation for the project. Martin Woodward, Robin Ginn, and the team has been super-helpful in many matters including open source governance and administrative support, to marketing and communications.
And Open Live Writer is many thousands of lines of C# code, so the .NET Foundation is a good technical match too. J
Enough Background, SHOW ME THE BITS!
To download the latest version of Open Live Writer, visit our website: http://www.OpenLiveWriter.org/. Open Live Writer is designed to sit side-by-side with Windows Live Writer so installing Open Live Writer won’t impact your existing version of Windows Live Writer.
For the latest news and updates about Open Live Writer, you can follow us on Twitter as @OpenLiveWriter and find other ways to connect on: http://www.OpenLiveWriter.org/.
Help Wanted
Open Live Writer is brought to you by a volunteer team and continued improvements are dependent on volunteers. The code is available on GitHub: http://www.github.com/OpenLiveWriter/ and we welcome pull requests and open issues.
However, we’re not just looking for developers. Anyone who wants to test early bits, help with visual design, interactive design, technical writing, partnership negotiation, product management, marketing, digital media, and more would be welcomed. You can find ways to plug-in to the community at: http://www.OpenLiveWriter.org/.
Thank You
Thanks very much for your interest in Open Live Writer and many happy blog posts—
--Rob
Rob Dolin (@RobDolin)
Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Cross-Platform and Open Tools team
(On behalf of the Open Live Writer committers)