Windows Subsystem for Linux becomes open source

At its Build developer conference this week, Microsoft announced that Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is now open source. Developers can download the code, contribute bug fixes and new features, and participate in its development.

“We’ve seen how much the community has contributed to WSL without access to the source code, and we can’t wait to see how WSL will evolve now that the community can make direct code contributions to the project,” said Pierre Boulay of Microsoft in a comment on the Windows Developer Blog.

Windows Subsystem for Linux allows users to run Linux distributions in Windows. Thanks to WSL, it is possible to switch seamlessly between Linux and Windows programs.

The first version of WSL was launched back in August 2016, but the big boost came three years later with the release of WSL 2, which swapped an emulator for a Linux kernel.

According to Bleeping Computer, Microsoft also open-sourced the command line tools wsl.exe and wslg.exe this week, as well as the background service wslservice.exe, all components of WSL. It didn’t, however, make Lxcore.sys, P9rdr.sys, or p9np.dll open source, as they are part of Windows.

If you want to download the source code for version 2.5.7, GitHub is the place to go.