Microsoft open sources PowerShell; brings it to Linux and Mac OS X

The open-source version of PowerShell only supports three Linux flavors on launch and provides limited interoperability with third party management software.

Sysadmins, rejoice: PowerShell is coming to Linux and Mac.

The PowerShell open source project is now available on GitHub, along with alpha versions for the Ubuntu, Centos, and Red Hat variants of Linux.

Once Microsoft got.NET Core to work on Linux and Mac OSX – through .NET Core 1.0 – the company refactored PowerShell to work on top of it.

As recently rumored, Microsoft is open sourcing PowerShell and making a version of the tool available for Linux and Mac OS X.

Microsoft has shown interest in being more cross platform and open, and Satya Nadella himself even said, “Microsoft loves Linux”. PowerShell is itself a scripting language, and people can write PowerShell commands and scripts inside text editors including Visual Studio Code and Sublime Text.

Because PowerShell is.NET-based, Microsoft needed.NET on other platforms in order to bring PowerShell to other platforms, said Microsoft Technical Fellow and father of PowerShell Jeffrey Snover. But once that’s done, administrators will be able to use PowerShell on Windows to remotely manage a fleet of Linux systems, something that customers have been wanting for quite some time.

A decade after its initial release, PowerShell is going open-source.

Microsoft Corporation is a public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and service.

VMware has also partnered with Microsoft to release new cmdlets for PowerShell that work across platforms, too. In fact, an official Microsoft blog post noted that one in three VM’s on Azure are Linux based, and almost 60 percent of third-party IaaS offers in the Azure Marketplace are open source. In the background, Microsoft plans to make some additions of its own to the tool in an effort to streamline management operations for enterprise users.