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.

Comments

Azure, Exchange SQL et al

[bernywork]

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.