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.”
I smell desperation. The prospects of the EU 🇪🇺 abandoning Microsoft en masse must be scary.
Microsoft’s… Linux… open source…
Alternate timeline confirmed. 😳
Kinda wild it was ever closed-source, but credit where it’s due, I guess.
Another thing goes open-source.
Wait, what? Didn’t it have a pile of GPL code in it to begin with? Were they violating those licenses until now?
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.
Cool, so the main fork would be (LSW) Linux subsystem for Windows. No wants you anymore Windows.
