Tag Archives: Open Source

Testing 1 2 3: Open Live Writer (formerly Microsoft Live Writer)

openlivewriter_20151212

 

Microsoft moved its old Live Writer blogging tool to an MIT Open Source license. The application itself was always free. And, now the source code is available as well. The project provides an installer for Windows. So, you don’t need to compile the code to run it on Windows. I haven’t used Live Writer in years (it was part of the old Windows Live Toolkit package). I’m looking forward to taking a deeper look at it (I’m using it now to create this blog entry) to see if it can perform the relatively simply needs I have for blog writing. You can learn more about the project here:

http://openlivewriter.org/

Symbian, S60, and UIQ Team Up and Go Open Source

I usually get all kinds of UIQ press releases that I don’t care about. The one time there is a UIQ related news item I DO care about, I don’t get anything. Figures. I read this on Brighthand and went over to Nokia’s site to find the press release.

Mobile leaders to unify the Symbian software platform and set the future of mobile free – Foundation to be established to provide royalty-free open platform and accelerate innovation

The gist of the press release is that Nokia is buying all of Symbian (it already owned a big chunk of it) and is creating the Symbian Foundation. Sony Ericsson and Motorola and kicking in its UIQ (which used to stand for User Interface Quartz – I can see why they got rid of that part) UI into the mix. And Docomo (Japan) sounds like it will contribute its MOAP(S) (Mobile Oriented Applications Platform).

The big news though, IMHO, is that Nokia says they plan to Open Source this mix under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0. I guess this is reaction/preparation to/against the Google Android phone platform.

It is a long haul to get phone OSes off the ground and into the market (just as Microsoft or Google) though. So, I don’t expect to see anything from the Nokia Foundation until 2010 or so at the earliest.