[German]At the BUILD 2025 developer conference, Microsoft announced that it had released WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) as open source and is being celebrated by developers. The hope from Redmond is that software developers can now contribute to WSL and create their own versions.
Advertising
I read this "news" on various websites during the night – and the following tweet from Microsoft points this out.
The code on which the WSL is based is now available on GitHub as open source under Microsoft/WSL.
Brief history
Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) was announced at BUILD 2016 – almost 10 years later, the code is now generally released. WSL 2 has been in development since 2019. And the environment has now received new features such as GPU support, support for graphical applications (via wslg) and support for systemd.
I hadn't realized that WSL was separated from the Windows codebase in 2021 and moved into its own codebase. This new WSL variant was first released in July 2021 as version 0.47.1 in the Microsoft Store as a preview. WSL 1.0.0, the production version with support for Windows 10, was then released in November 2022.
Advertising
WSL 2.0.0 is now available, which provides improvements such as mirrored networks, DNS tunneling, session 0 support, proxy support, firewall support and much more.
It's now a project for community developer
Interested parties can download this code for WSL at Microsoft/WSL and create it from the source code, add new fixes and features and participate in the active development of WSL, Microsoft hopes.
How this is to be handled in production environments with fixes or extensions remains a mystery to me at this point. It is also unclear how widely and intensively WSL is really used in practice.
Persönlich rangierte das Ganze für mich unter "Sack Reis in China umgefallen" – aber die Abrufzahlen des obigen Tweets zeigen wohl, dass Interesse an der Meldung besteht. Microsoft hat die Details im Blog-Beitrag The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source veröffentlicht.
The number of views of the above tweet shows that there is interest in this move. Microsoft has published the details in the blog post The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source.
Advertising
