Microsoft makes PowerShell open source

PowerShell’s deb package metadata seems to indicate that PowerShell is going open source. The addition that “PowerShell is an open-source, cross-platform, scripting language and rich object shell” was discovered by Tom Hounsell and then posted to Twitter.

Hounsell test builds for OS X and Linux of PowerShellCore for some time now and it seems that the intention is to make PowerShell open source. No official announcement has yet been made from Microsoft. Also, the information on PowerShell’s GitHub page hasn’t been updated yet.

Microsoft first released PowerShell in 2006 and is currently at version 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.