Microsoft announced back in May at their Build developer conference that [1]WSL would be going open-source . Today Windows Subsystem for Linux 2.6 was released as their first new release now being an open-source project.

The WSL2 source code has been public since their Build 2025 announcement but today marks the first new feature release under the open-source flag. Microsoft open-sourced WSL in hoping to spur more community growth around it and making it easier in tracking down bugs and contributing to the project.

Windows Subsystem for Linux 2.6 is their first open-source release while also bringing stability improvements and a variety of bug fixes and other enhancements.

- First open source release of WSL

- Various stability improvements

- Update localized strings

- Don't throw when unregistering a distro that has a BasePath that doesn't exist

- Fix distribution download failing if the URL contains parameters

- Fix various issues with systemd user sessions

- Fix wslsettings crash when invoked from wslservice

- Set MOVEFILE_WRITE_THROUGH when moving distribution VHD's

- Discard BOM header when parsing the Windows 'hosts' file

- Correctly report corrupted disks when mount() fails with EUCLEAN

- Don't use a ? prefix when resolving the distribution location

- Solve potential failure while downloading a distribution if LastError is non zero

Downloads and more details on the MIT-licensed WSL 2.6.0 release via [2]GitHub .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Microsoft-Edit-Open-Source

[2] https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/releases/tag/2.6.0