The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
blogs.windows.com
Today we’re very excited to announce the open-source release of the Windows Subsystem for Linux. This is the result of a multiyear effort to prepare for this, and a great closure to the first ever issue raised on the Microsoft/WSL repo:

Today we’re very excited to announce the open-source release of the Windows Subsystem for Linux. This is the result of a multiyear effort to prepare for this, and a great closure to the first ever issue raised on the Microsoft/WSL repo:

https://github.com/microsoft/WSL

  • ramble81@lemm.eeEnglish
    251·
    18 hours ago

    So besides the brownie points, im curious what having it open sourced will benefit. Not like you can fork it to run on a different OS. You can make some extensions but to do what? You can’t really tie it further in to the host OS unless you know of some undocumented Win32 APIs.

    Maybe im just not thinking creatively enough.

    • SuiXi3D@fedia.io
      371·
      16 hours ago

      im curious what having it open sourced will benefit

      MS won’t have to pay their own people to work on it anymore.

    • CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      25·
      18 hours ago

      They released their code as MIT which is far more permissive than I was expecting. I was expecting some sort of proprietary license.

      But they need to keep doing stuff like this. Devcontainers for VS Code is still proprietary and keeps me from running codium.

    • The_Decryptor@aussie.zoneEnglish
      9·
      16 hours ago

      Not like you can fork it to run on a different OS.

      For WSL1? yep that’s effectively impossible.

      WSL2 is effectively just a wrapper around the kernel virtualization support and a bundling format, as long as whatever image you run talks to the host properly (like any other virtualised OS would) it’d run.

      • TerHu@lemm.eeEnglish
        6·
        10 hours ago

        does that mean we could build a wsl that provides the flatpak environment, so that we could get a one click install flatpak for windows?

        • The_Decryptor@aussie.zoneEnglish
          2·
          7 hours ago

          Should be possible, as it’s a normal VM you can already install flatpak apps in said VM as normal, you’d just need a Windows side bit to invoke the install within WSL when you opened the flatpak bundle, and then something to add a start menu shortcut from the app inside the VM (Which I actually assume already exists, I never actually ran WSL2 when I was on Windows)

          • ramble81@lemm.eeEnglish
            2·
            5 hours ago

            WSL2 now supports WSLg which allows you to run X11 (or other graphics packages) natively now.