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- Build 2025 was all over AI, but Microsoft also made WSL open source
- The company knows how valuable its community of contributors has been
- Microsoft wants users to “solve a problem and learn together as a community”
Microsoft has officially opened Windows sub-system for Linux on its annual software engineer and web developer conference, Microsoft Build 2025.
Most components are now open-source, with the exception of some elements that are directly bound to Windows, with the source code available on Github.
Through Open-Sourcing WSL, Microsoft has opened it for direct contributions, job development and bug fixes of the broader community, after he acknowledges that the community has already contributed considerably prior to the open sourcing.
“As the community grew behind WSL, WSL got more functions such as GPU support, support for graphic applications (via WSLG) and support for Systemd,” Pierre Boulay from Microsoft explained. “It eventually became clear that to keep track of the growing community and function requests, WSL had to move faster and to be sent separately from Windows.”
Boulay shared part of the history of WSL, including the separation of Windows in 2021 when it became its own package, distributed via the Microsoft Store.
“WSL could never have been what it is today without its community. Even without access to the source code of WSL, people were able to make great contributions that lead to what WSL is today,” Boulay added.
Despite the meaning of WSL that becomes Open Source, Chief Communications Officer Frank X Shaw only wrote a brief comment about it in the conference Newsbook. An extract is: “It facilitates cooperation between WSL users, so that they can be resolved and together as a community can learn.”
It is not surprising that the core announcements at Build are focused on artificial intelligence, with countless updates that are published by the Copilot agents of the company to stimulate productivity in Microsoft 365 apps.
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