With restrictions: Microsoft releases Windows subsystem code for Linux
Microsoft releases its Windows subsystem for Linux as an open source project and invites the community to develop it. However, some parts remain proprietary.
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Microsoft has now released the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) as an open-source project. The company announced this during its Microsoft Build conference for software and web developers and made the code available on GitHub. Users can now “download WSL, compile it themselves, add their fixes and functions and contribute to the development”, writes the US company in its developer blog. Almost all the previously proprietary code is available as open source.
WSL consists of several components. On the one hand, it includes command line applications that serve as entry points for interacting with the subsystem, such as wsl.exe, wslconfig.exe and wslg.exe. It also includes the service application, which starts the virtual machine of the WSL, loads distributions and mounts file shares in the Linux systems. Linux init and daemon processes and corresponding binaries, as well as the implementation of plan9 for file exchange, are also part of WSL and are now available as open source.
Microsoft does not release all parts of WSL
Individual components of WSL were already previously available under an open-source license. This includes the Linux kernel of WSL as well as support for Wayland and X11. However, Microsoft is also excluding individual parts of WSL from the open-source project. lxcore.sys, the kernel driver of WSL 1, as well as P9rsr.sys and p9np.dll, which are used to redirect the file system from Windows to Linux, remain explicitly under a proprietary license, as they are still part of Windows images.
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“Even without access to the source code, the community has contributed to the development of WSL,” writes Microsoft on the blog. “We are excited to see how the project will evolve.” However, it is still unclear how Microsoft intends to manage WSL as an open-source project and how it will deal with code contributions from the community. Microsoft has made the source code of the current version 2.5.7 available for download on GitHub. Most recently, Microsoft added another official Linux distribution to WSL with Fedora 42.
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