Microsoft’s Windows subsystem for Linux has become an important tool for developers and power users from its introduction in Windows 10 anniversary in 2016, giving them access to an integrated Linux command line and Linux applications from Windows.
The company has regularly improved WSL since then, improving performance, facilitating the installation and use and addition of features such as GPU and audio support. But today, as part of its Build Developer conference, Microsoft announced that it would make almost all of WSL’s open source, closing the very first issue that the new WSL project then attracted to Github in 2016.
“WSL could never have been what he is today without his community,” wrote Microsoft’s senior software engineer, Pierre Boulay, in the company’s blog post. “We have 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 now evolve that the community can make direct contributions to the project.”
Only two WSL elements remain at a closed source for the moment: an LXCore.sys nucleus pilot used for WSL 1 (the initial version of WSL which is always supported, although the new default installation of WSL 2 in 2019); And the P9RDR.SYS and P9NP.DLL files that manage the redirection of the Windows file system to Linux (in other words, which means that Windows can easily access the Linux file system). Microsoft did not close the door to the opening of these components, but did not say if or when he planned to make them open source.
