Canonical's Multipass lightweight VM manager for not only Linux systems but also Windows and macOS is now considered fully open-source. Multipass started out as a means of running an Ubuntu environment with ease from a single command on major operating systems. With today's Multipass 1.16 release candidate, it's now fully open-source.

Multipass relies on KVM for virtualization on Linux, Microsoft Hyper-V on Windows, and QEMU under macOS for running virtual machines (VMs) with low overhead. Multipass has been under a GNU GPLv3 license but not all of it was open-source. There were some portions of the Windows and macOS code that were proprietary up to this point but now integrated into the open-source Multipass codebase.

With today's Multipass 1.16 RC release they proclaim " the entire code base became fully open source! ... Fully open source. Previously proprietary bits for Windows and macOS are now part of this repository. "

[1]

More details on the proprietary bits being opened up via the Multipass merge of [2]One Repo To Rule Them All .

Multipass 1.16 has also been working on improvements to its GUI, fixes to the daemon/service, and security improvements. There is also better documentation.

More details on today's Multipass 1.16 release candidate via [3]GitHub .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2025&image=multipass_lrg

[2] https://github.com/canonical/multipass/pull/4058

[3] https://github.com/canonical/multipass/releases/tag/v1.16.0-rc3