Microsoft recently announced the first open source release of the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). 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 Since the Windows 10 era, Microsoft has had a trend of moving core Windows components to separate packages on the Microsoft Store to allow more flexible release cycles - updates can be delivered independent from Windows feature releases.