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Microsoft open-sources the Windows Subsystem for Linux

Microsoft has announced that it has open sourced the Windows Subsystem for Linux. WSL, as it's commonly called, allows users to run Linux apps directly on Windows.

All you need to do to install WSL is run the following command in a terminal: wsl --install

Refer to this article for additional details regarding how to set up WSL.

WSL was first announced at the Build 2016 developer conference, and shipped with the Windows 10 Anniversary update. While the original release was based on lxcore.sys, a pico process provider that Windows used to run ELF executables natively. Microsoft released WSL 2 in 2019, with native support for the Linux kernel, to improve the compatibility of apps. It also introduced new capabilities like GPU Support, options to run Linux apps with GUI, mirrored networking, DNS tunneling, session 0 support, proxy support, firewall support, etc.

Ever since WSL's initial release, users and developers had been requesting Microsoft to open source the virtual machine code. That's what happened at the Build 2025 dev conference. Microsoft says it had to work on decoupling WSL from the Windows codebase in order to release the source code as a standalone app.

Developers can now analyze the code, and contribute to it, propose enhancements, thus helping WSL to evolve into a more powerful app. The Windows Subsystem for Linux source code has been released under the MIT License. It is available on GitHub.

It is worth noting that the following components are still part of the Windows image and are not open sourced at this time: Lxcore.sys, the kernel side driver that powers WSL 1. P9rdr.sys and p9np.dll, which run the “\\wsl.localhost” filesystem redirection (from Windows to Linux) are also closed source for now.

Microsoft has also released an open source, command-line text editor for Windows, called Edit.

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