this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
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The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source. (blogs.windows.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago by MCasq_qsaCJ_234@lemmy.zip to c/technology@lemmy.world
187 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Today we’re very excited to announce the open-source release of the Windows Subsystem for Linux. This is the result of a multiyear effort to prepare for this, and a great closure to the first ever issue raised on the Microsoft/WSL repo:

https://github.com/microsoft/WSL

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[–] azvasKvklenko@sh.itjust.works 6 points 2 weeks ago

Thanks for nothing Microsoft

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Ah, the Linux Subsystem for Windows (MSFT has never been great at naming things) is finally open source, hooray...

Now do it with rest of the operating system, and I may, possibly have a reason to care.

[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 5 points 2 weeks ago

Windows, you mean? Please no, thanks, I don't need to see anything of that garbage

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[–] ramble81@lemm.ee 23 points 2 weeks ago (7 children)

So besides the brownie points, im curious what having it open sourced will benefit. Not like you can fork it to run on a different OS. You can make some extensions but to do what? You can’t really tie it further in to the host OS unless you know of some undocumented Win32 APIs.

Maybe im just not thinking creatively enough.

[–] The_Decryptor@aussie.zone 10 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Not like you can fork it to run on a different OS.

For WSL1? yep that's effectively impossible.

WSL2 is effectively just a wrapper around the kernel virtualization support and a bundling format, as long as whatever image you run talks to the host properly (like any other virtualised OS would) it'd run.

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[–] SuiXi3D@fedia.io 36 points 2 weeks ago

im curious what having it open sourced will benefit

MS won’t have to pay their own people to work on it anymore.

[–] CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 23 points 2 weeks ago

They released their code as MIT which is far more permissive than I was expecting. I was expecting some sort of proprietary license.

But they need to keep doing stuff like this. Devcontainers for VS Code is still proprietary and keeps me from running codium.

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