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> Apple doesn't want to ship a new version because they don't want people to see how they've modified bash.

This is just false, the old bash is GPL2 and Apple publishes the source for their bash on their open source compliance page. The reason they don't upgrade is the GPL3 patent grant clause, they ship the last GPL2 release for all GNU utils. The linux kernel is GPL2, so Microsoft doesn't have this problem.

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Microsoft ships the entire Ubuntu, which does contain GPL3 code. Maybe they get away with it because it's not so integrated with the rest of Windows.

In WSL1 Microsoft only ships an implementation of the Linux syscall interface, the actual userland comes in the form of a tarball inside an appx package from Canonical, through the MS Store.

I don't exactly know how WSL2 works, but the main difference is that they now use an actual Linux kernel inside a lightweight VM, and that kernel's source is on GitHub. Userland still comes from appx-wrapped tarballs from Canonical.

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