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The news from the Microsoft Builders Conference that surprised me the most is that Microsoft will provide a real Linux kernel – under GPL, with all the patches released – with Windows. This announcement was made with the announcement of Windows Terminal, a new front-end for Windows-based command-line programs that supports, among other things, tabs.
Microsoft's growing involvement in open source software is not new, as projects such as Visual Studio Code and the .NET runtime have functioned as community-based open source projects. But this week's ads were a little different.
The Linux kernel will power Microsoft's second-generation Windows (WSL) subsystem. The first generation of WSL files contains a new partial implementation of the Linux kernel API that uses the Windows NT kernel to run its features. By choosing this approach, Microsoft avoided the use of real Linux code and thus avoided the GPL license containing "viral" stipulations that would have forced Microsoft to open the source WSL and possibly even parts of Windows.
In the second generation of WSL? It is a full GPL Linux kernel running on a lightweight virtual machine. This will not be part of the basic Windows installation (it has been said that developers will first have to enable developer mode in Windows), but it is nevertheless a problem. a GPL licensed component that is part of a Windows component. The WSL feature of Windows is based on GPL databases and it was not what I thought I would write a year or two ago.
Open Windows itself
The Windows Terminal project is no less important. Many Windows users will know that their command line programs depend on a named process conhost.exe it's responsible for drawing the command line windows. As part of the Windows terminal, Microsoft released the source code conhost.exe. This is an important (albeit uninteresting) element of Windows itself, and Microsoft has released it using the permissive MIT license. That's, I think, unprecedented. Although Microsoft has opened source Windows utilities such as Calculator, this is the first time the company has released primary Windows code – and with an open source license to boot.
The Windows Terminal project is licensed in a similar way. Although its brand is one of the first alpha versions at the moment, once stabilized and equipped with a solid feature set, it will likely be integrated with Windows and shipped as a standard Windows component. Just like for the edition of conhost.exeThis is also a first: a (new) main Windows component developed in open source.
Microsoft has changed. This is not the company that it once was. Open source is no longer the enemy, it is now something that plays a role in the whole of society. And open source does not apply only to discrete and autonomous applications; it's now a viable building block for the main features of Windows.
In 2015, Mark Russinovich said that Microsoft could open source Windows. At that time, I wrote that this would not happen soon, but that individual components, such as the increasing number of .NET Framework components, could be expected to their open source. And now, that seems to be the very path that Microsoft is taking. Open source is more than an element of the company's toolbox, and there is little apparent limit to its use.
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