Microsoft has officially made the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) open-source, allowing developers to download the code from GitHub and contribute to its development. Windows chief Pavan Davuluri noted this move responds to long-standing community requests. After years of iteration, Microsoft restructured the operating system to support a standalone WSL project. Developers can now enhance WSL's performance and integrate better with Linux services, marking a significant evolution for the feature since its debut in 2016.
"It has been a consistent request from the developer community for some time now," says Windows chief Pavan Davuluri. "It took us a little bit of time, because we needed to refactor the operating system to allow WSL to live in a standalone capacity that then allowed us to open-source the project and be able to have developers go and make contributions and for us to ingest those into the Windows pipeline and ship it at scale."
The WSL code is now available on GitHub, allowing developers to download it and build it from source, participate in fixes, or even add new features. Davuluri says he's now expecting that developers will use the open-source project to help improve WSL performance, or for more integration into Linux services.
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