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.
And how is this going to stop anyone from moving away from Microsoft?
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.
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.
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.
There are policies being erected to direct funds to open-source projects instead of closed source ones.
Microsoft’s… Linux… open source…
Alternate timeline confirmed. 😳
Another thing goes open-source.
Kinda wild it was ever closed-source, but credit where it’s due, I guess.
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.
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.
