Microsoft Officially Open Sources PowerShell, Releases Linux Build

As we reported last month, the open-sourcing of Microsoft’s PowerShell appeared a done deal. Now, a month later, the company has made the whole thing official, publishing the source to GitHub, along with Linux and OS X flavoured binaries.

If you just want to jump in, you can download the appropriate packages straight from the PowerShell repository. Alternatively, Microsoft’s Jeffrey Snover has a detailed post on Azure explain the decision to release the code.

According to Snover, there are a few factors involved in the move, though overwhelmingly, the company wants businesses and developers to be able to use the best tools for the job, regardless of platform.

Hence the reason for bringing Bash to Windows and ultimately, creating .NET Core and making .NET available on platforms other than Windows, without having to rely on Mono (obviously, this mindset came pre-acquisition).

That said, Microsoft hasn’t gone all the way with PowerShell. Right now, the company is still testing the waters, so to speak:

So, where are we in this journey? We are in the beginning stages and in learning mode. We started by open sourcing small portions of PowerShell and talking to a number of our partners who were experienced with open source to understand what it took to succeed. What we learned, is that it is critical that individual users can use Git to checkout code, make changes, compile everything on their machines and run all the tests to verify that their change didn’t break anything. This required a large investment in our engineering/build/test systems. We also worked to define a governance model so we had clear roles, responsibilities, and processes so that community contributions could be smoothly incorporated into the product.

If you’d like to learn more, there’s a video going over the project in detail on Channel 9, which you’ll find embedded below:

PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux [Microsoft]


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