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Microsoft’s Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open-source (www.theverge.com)

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by cm0002@lemmy.world to c/opensource@programming.dev

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Microsoft is making its Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) open-source today, opening up the code for community members to contribute to. After launching WSL for Windows 10 nearly nine years ago, it has been a multiyear effort at Microsoft to open-source the feature that enables a Linux environment within Windows.

“It has been a consistent request from the developer community for some time now,” says Windows chief Pavan Davuluri in an interview with The Verge. “It took us a little bit of time, because we needed to refactor the operating system to allow WSL to live in a standalone capacity that then allowed us to open-source the project and be able to have developers go and make contributions and for us to ingest those into the Windows pipeline and ship it at scale.”

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[–] grue@lemmy.world 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Wait, what? Didn't it have a pile of GPL code in it to begin with? Were they violating those licenses until now?

[–] nik9000@programming.dev 3 points 3 days ago

I imagine it emulates all the system calls. It sure would have been easier to copy bits from Linux for that. But you don't have to. Wine sure didn't.

I probably should go read the code and not guess.