It’s a major milestone for Microsoft’s Linux environment in Windows

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.”

  • Mike@lemm.ee
    202·
    13 days ago

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

      • Mike@lemm.ee
        5·
        13 days ago

        Microsoft knows the allure of Open-Source projects. And the EU is investing in those also.

        They are hoping people will dual boot into Linux using a VM instead of switching to Linux entirely.

        • Damarus@feddit.org
          1·
          12 days ago

          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.

          • Mike@lemm.ee
            2·
            12 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.

  • grue@lemmy.world
    7·
    13 days ago

    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·
      12 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.

    • Laser@feddit.org
      1·
      12 days ago

      The equivalent to WSL is Wine, but it’s not Linux-specific. However, it’s architecturally much closer to WSL 1 than to the current WSL 2.