As far as I know, WSL is "Ubuntu on Windows", so wouldn't this be a conflict of interest? Maybe they would simply work out a deal to pay a royalty to Canonical

As far as I know, WSL is "Ubuntu on Windows", so wouldn't this be a conflict of interest? Maybe they would simply work out a deal to pay a royalty to Canonical or something. Wouldn't that be poetic. I think it would be really interesting if MS competed in that space. But 'nix sysadmins don't want to worry about maintaining a Windows instance concurrently with their server instances (assuming the only facilities they need are what 'nix provides). Microsoft having Windows attached to their Linux distribution is a net negative, in my opinion. Edit: Formatting