Open Live Writer

I was pair programming with Scott Hanselman several months in an attempt to improve the dasBlog platform, and he hinted that there was a chance that the venerable Windows Live Writer, with which I am currently writing this post, may actually get open sourced. There have been no updates to Windows Live Writer since 2012 and for all intents and purposes has been considered dead. It took sometime, but today Scott confirmed the release of Open Live Writer (OLW) to our open source community.

Open Live Writer has been released under the permissive MIT License and as you would expect developers are required to sign the .NET foundation CLA, which gives the community full permission to use your contribution.

OLW is available to download now, but be warned spell checking (along with a  few other things) has been disabled, this may be a show stopper for some of us but I sincerely believe solutions will be quickly available.

For the historical record:

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 was acquired by Microsoft in 2006 and organized with the Spaces team. Becky Pezely joined the team and over time, the team grew and shipped many popular releases of Windows Live Writer.