It seems that more major players in the tech industry want to turn most of their products into open source. Recently, Microsoft opened up Chakra, the JavaScript engine in its Edge Web browser. Even more recently, the company did the same for Live Writer, its blogging app.

Live Writer lets users create posts offline and publish them later. The app includes various tools and features, such as spell check, image editing, maps from Virtual Earth, and better category management. For bloggers, Live Writer provides almost everything needed to create the ideal blog post and enhance it with video, audio, and visuals. However, users not happy with Live Writer’s options can create their own, as the app’s code is now open source. The code can be found on GitHub, the open source coding platform for many major projects, and can be developed further by the open source community.

This isn’t Microsoft’s first experience using Open Source; as mentioned, Chakra—the heart of the company’s Internet browser, Microsoft Edge—was made open source just recently on Dec. 5, 2015. In an effort to differentiate the non-open source version of Chakra from the new open sourced version, Microsoft has renamed it ChakraCore.

There are a few small differences between Chakra and ChakraCore. Most notably, Chakra has diagnostic APIs that use Microsoft component object model (COM) technology and, hence, are Windows-specific. These won’t be in ChakraCore, however. Instead, a new set of diagnostic APIs will be developed and eventually integrated into the full Chakra.

Bigger companies, such as Microsoft, fully understand the benefits that come from making their software products open source. Using open source allows projects to be completed faster and more efficiently, as well as allows for more developers to share their ideas and make changes. The open source community certainly follows a pay-it-forward model. Microsoft, along with other big name brands in the technology space, Google, IBM and Netflix for example, are capitalizing on it.

The result? More innovative software and a chance for everyone to contribute.