Microsoft has announced that Windows PowerShell will be released as an open source program and has built an binary alpha version that will run on some Linux distributions and OS X.
PowerShell is a task-based command-line shell and scripting language built on the .NET Framework. Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems have long had scripting available through different command-line interfaces.
This is the third big move by Microsoft in making its software available on Linux. SQL Server was announced some time back and then the core of the .NET framework was open-sourced.
The alpha binary will run on Red Hat, CentOS and Ubuntu and Mac OS X.
{loadposition sam08}In a post on the Microsoft Azure blog, Jeffrey Snover, technical fellow from the Microsoft Enterprise Cloud Group, said the initial release would be community supported but down the line an official Microsoft released version of PowerShell, based on open source, would be released to anyone running a supported version of Windows or UNIX.
"The timing of the official Microsoft version will be based upon community input and business needs," he added.
Asked for his reaction to the Microsoft move on PowerShell, Debian developer and sysadmin Russell Coker said he was sure that some people in the Linux community would be opposed to it.
"But I think that all free software is good," he said. "If the software is available under a suitable licence so that anyone can use it and modify it without legal risk — i.e. no potential claims that they infringe copyright by working on other shells after reading PowerShell code — then that's a good thing.
"If some Linux users find that PowerShell suits their needs better than Perl or bash programs that's great too."