Microsoft makes PowerShell open source and available for Linux and OS X

As a rumor suggested, Microsoft has made Powershell open source and made alpha versions available for Linux and OS X, among others. The different versions of the developer terminal are available for immediate download from GitHub.

Microsoft PowerShell architect Jeffrey Snover made the news on Thursday on the Microsoft Azure blog. PowerShell is directly available for download for OS X 10.11, Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 and CentOS 7. The software is freely available under the MIT license. At the end of 2014, Microsoft already decided to make .net, the framework with which PowerShell works, open source. A month and a half ago, the open source .net core reached version 1.0. Microsoft says it wants to make it possible for developers to use the same tools and programming language on different platforms.

It was already known that PowerShell builds for OS X and Linux were being worked on, but there was no official announcement that the software would be open source. It was rumored that PowerShell would be the next software from Microsoft to become open source. In late July, a PowerShell tester tweeted that he had found references to open source creation in the metadata of the tool’s deb package.

Microsoft first released PowerShell in 2006 and the version of the software released now is alpha 6.0. The latest release version of Powershell is currently 5.1. PowerShell can be seen as a ‘successor’ to the MS DOS commandline interface. The first version was suitable for Windows XP SP2, Server 2003 and Vista. It is an object-oriented shell and scripting language based on the .net framework. The tool is widely used by administrators to perform tasks within COM and WMI. Earlier this year, it was also announced that the reverse had happened: Unix shell Bash was made part of Windows.