Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft PowerShell Goes Open Source and Lands On Linux and Mac (pcworld.com)
Microsoft announced on Thursday that it is open sourcing PowerShell, its system administration, scripting, and configuration management tool that has been a default part of Windows for several years. The company says it will soon release PowerShell on Mac and Linux platforms. PCWorld reports: The company is also releasing alpha versions of PowerShell for Linux (specifically Ubuntu, Centos and Redhat) and Mac OS X. A new PowerShell GitHub page gives people the ability to download binaries of the software, as well as access to the app's source code. PowerShell on Linux and Mac will let people who have already built proficiency with Microsoft's scripting language take those skills and bring them to new platforms. Meanwhile, people who are used to working on those platforms will have access to a new and very powerful tool for getting work done. It's part of Microsoft's ongoing moves to open up products that the company has previously kept locked to platforms that it owned. The company's open sourcing of its .NET programming frameworks in 2014 paved the way for this launch, by making the building blocks of PowerShell available on Linux and OS X. By making PowerShell available on Linux, Microsoft has taken the skills of Windows administrators who are already used to the software, and made them more marketable. It has also made it possible for hardcore Linux users to get access to an additional set of tools that they can use to manage a variety of systems.
I use Powershell extensively to deploy applications using Microsoft SCCM at work. I use Linux the rest of the time. Bash scripting is very suitable to the way *nix commands work. Powershell is very suitable to scripting in Windows. I find PS very easy to learn and to work in, but only because I was already familiar with concepts like the pipeline (from Linux) and objects (from python ;-). I can create a PS script to install and configure an application quickly and easily because, just as in Linux there are commands that do everything you need to do, in PS there are cmdlets that allow you to easily (for the most part) access the various subsystems of Windows.
I see PS as a greatly improved, much easier way of doing what I used to struggle to do with vbscript or, a long time ago, with batch files.
The reason for doing this I thought would have been obvious, but from the comments it doesn't seem so.
No Linux admin, who administers standard Linux bare metal or VMs is going to install this, not in a million years, they've got bash scripts with GNU utils, or they learnt Python or Perl or something else years and years ago, they've no use for PowerShell...
If however, you use Azure (MS *are* the second largest cloud computing provider), and you want to do web scale, Microsoft either needs to start giving out Perl and or Python modules, or they need to get PowerShell on Mac / Linux for people to be able to script their Azure / SQL / Exchange instances so that the admins and devs can integrate with Chef and everything else out there.
With the amount of work that's gone into Powershell for it to be an admins platform, it's *easier* to port Powershell to Linux than what it is to rebuild powershell for Python or Perl or whatever else.
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
What I particularly dislike is how it automatically filters output, and you have to use arguments or other applets to give you fuller output. It just strikes me as being the exact opposite of how any particular command or script should work.
And objects, big fucking deal. I've been using Bourne variants for a quarter of a century and never thought "Boy, I wish I had classes".
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Umm, desktop systems and apps may not be the growth business they once were, but they still make Microsoft billions. It's not that they want out of those businesses - it's that they're trying to keep up with the overall industry move to the cloud. Not that it would be a bad idea for Microsoft to start basing their cloud operations on Linux - assuming they could get more out of their hardware that way. Maybe they really are thinking along those lines, and want their software to work there - for their own purposes. That'd be pretty forward-looking.
Of course, Occam's Razor would favor locking admins into their Windows-specific toolset as the explanation...
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
My brother is responsible to hire Windows admin at his university. Believe or not, he actually post looking for Unix admins! Based on previous experience, he says that if a guy can admin Unix, he will be better administering Windows then a Windows only admin.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.