Microsoft Open Sources Powershell Tool

Microsoft has officially opened-sourced Powershell, its system administration and configuration management tool after posting the software on GitHub, where the code is available under the MIT license.

It comes after Microsoft continues its open source drive. It has already made its .Net technology open source, and last December open sourced an integral part of its Edge web browser.

Powershell Move

Besides making Powershell open source, Microsoft has also ported the technology to once bitter rival platforms, namely Linux and Mac OS X.

PowerShell, it should be remembered, is a task-based command-line shell and scripting language built on the .NET. Essentially it helps IT professionals control and automate the admin of Windows, and now Linux, as well as the applications that run on those platforms.

“Today’s customers live in a multi-platform, multi-cloud, multi-OS world – that’s just reality,” blogged Jeffrey Snover Technical Fellow at Microsoft Enterprise Cloud Group. “Microsoft is working company-wide to deliver management tools that empower customers to manage any platform, from anywhere, on any device, using Linux or Windows.”

“You’ve heard Satya Nadella say ‘Microsoft loves Linux’ and that’s never been more true than now,” Snover wrote. “Nearly one in three VMs on Azure are Linux. We have forged strong industry partners to extend choice to our customers. We’ve announced SQL Server on Linux, as well as open sourced .NET. We added Bash to Windows 10 to make it a great platform for developing OSS. And, we’re active contributors and participants to numerous open source projects (e.g. OpenSSH, FreeBSD, Mesos, Docker, Linux and many more) across the industry.”

“Today, we are taking the next step in our journey,” he said. “I am extremely excited to share that PowerShell is open sourced and available on Linux.

Snover said that the initial Linux support is for Ubuntu, CentOS and RedHat, but admitted that  “others will follow.”

Open Source

It is fair to say that Microsoft has had somewhat of a chequered past with the open source community.

Matters were not helped when Microsoft closed its MS Open Tech subsidiary last year, after launching the open source unit in 2012.

But despite that history, Microsoft has been making efforts to improve its once tense relationship with the community.

Late last year it teamed up with Red Hat to help customers embrace hybrid cloud computing by giving them more choice and flexibility deploying Red Hat solutions on Microsoft Azure.

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