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 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours 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 1 points 6 minutes ago

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

[–] Pirata@lemm.ee 6 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

I smell desperation. The prospects of the EU 🇪🇺 abandoning Microsoft en masse must be scary.

[–] Damarus@feddit.org 4 points 5 hours ago

And how is this going to stop anyone from moving away from Microsoft?

[–] renegadespork@lemmy.jelliefrontier.net 11 points 8 hours ago

Kinda wild it was ever closed-source, but credit where it's due, I guess.

[–] dohpaz42@lemmy.world 13 points 8 hours ago

Microsoft’s… Linux… open source…

Alternate timeline confirmed. 😳

[–] GolfNovemberUniform@infosec.pub 13 points 9 hours ago

Another thing goes open-source.