this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
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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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[–] Damarus@feddit.org 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

That has been possible for a long time already, and I can't see what publishing the source code changes in that regard. Am I missing something? It still costs more money to use Windows over Linux, and I think that is the reason why governments are moving over.

[–] Pirata@lemm.ee 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Nope, governments are moving over due to the one-sided trade war started by Trump.

The EU was more than happy to pay the price of Microsoft to maintain good relations. That's gone, now.

[–] Colloidal@programming.dev 1 points 3 days ago

There are policies being erected to direct funds to open-source projects instead of closed source ones.