Microsoft Open-Sources PowerShell & Brings It To Linux

[droste]

They do stuff for free because they lose the cloud market (azure), that's the only reason.
And as far as I can tell, they gave up on the mobile market (not officially, but their actions speak loud) .

[CrystalGamma]

Is it more usable than fish? Otherwise, I won't care …

[akincer]

(shrug) curious... what would motivate a linux user to learn it, and what would be the possible use cases for this, which couldn't already be handled by bash, python, ruby etc?

The most immediate use-case I can think of is that you have historically all-Windows shops that are now using Linux for one reason or another (budget is often #1 in my experience) that have tons of in-house Powershell skill but next to zero Linux skill. Putting a familiar scripting/management platform on Linux for their admins is an obvious fit.

A related use-case is that there are shops (such as the one I'm in) that have quite a bit of tools that do various things that are built in Powershell. Having to do very little or zero rewriting to get those tools to work on Linux is _VERY_ attractive. I have an automation script I wrote that is on the order of over 7,000 lines long written in Powershell that I would love to port over to Linux. In fact I was thinking of rewriting it in C++ to do just that but now I'll just wait and see if this offers a better path.

[Luke_Wolf]

MS is multibilion company i can't believe they do something for free... are they loosing markets? it looks that their phones aren't good as rivals...did Linux forced them to offer Win10 for free??? hm

You're looking for answers in all the wrong places. Powershell isn't a Microsoft Product, it's Microsoft software that has been freely distributed with Windows since XP. Nadella is undoing the damage that Ballmer did to the company and making it so that Microsoft is once more a Software Company as opposed to a Platform Company, as a result of no longer being stupid about trying to be a platform company Microsoft is porting it's software to all of the various platforms and what they freely distributed is now being open sourced.

As to Windows 10 there's 2 real sides to consider, #1. Consumers don't buy Windows Upgrades, ergo it's not exactly a significant loss to them to offer upgrades for free for a year, #2. Nadella explicitly wanted to unify the OS platform for developers to target, which also cuts down on support costs which saves them money.

[Xaero_Vincent]

This is really cool. I mean Linux already had an unofficial Mono-based PowerShell called Pash but it has only a small subset of cmdlet support so far. Genuine PowerShell is far more interesting.

BTW, for those who use Microsoft technologies, Microsoft Edge web browser and Cortana digital assistant can also be made to work on Linux distributions in an unofficial way. I just recently tested Cortana with Google's new Fuchsia's operating system on Archlinux and put a video up:

[torsionbar28]

The simple answer is that the industry is moving towards cloud deployments/ services model and they frequently leverage cross platform tools or Linux to do so.

That's an awfully bizarre perspective, considering the words "cloud" and "linux" have been synonymous for a while now. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, etc. all the biggest of the big are powered 100% by Linux. If you look at ANY of the popular web applications out there, they're all Linux-centric. Trying to deploy them on Windows OS is clunky, with broken functionality and a severely degraded experience. Some web applications don't even support Microsoft OS, they've given up on it.

I.e. Web services and cloud are not "frequently leveraging cross platform tools", they're leveraging a single platform - Linux. But Linux and open source are inherently cross platform, across *NIX style OS's anyways. Windows is such a niche player in this market, it's like a bad joke.

Tools that are platform specific are often a liability because the skills you learn can only be used in limited ways. Microsoft is increasingly making their tools and technologies to be cross platform to get the revenue they are now losing to leaders like Amazon and Google. They don't have the dominant position leveraging Windows like they used to. So this is their new approach and it seems to be working.

Nobody wants Microsoft tools on Linux. There are 3+ decades of unix shell scripting knowledge and experience out there. There's no compelling reason whatsoever to use a proprietary Microsoft shell. All it does, is lock you into Microsoft's proprietary little ecosystem. Its clear Microsoft is trying to own some of this cloud market, but they're failing spectacularly. It is fun to watch them flounder though!

[akincer]

Nobody wants Microsoft tools on Linux. There are 3+ decades of unix shell scripting knowledge and experience out there. There's no compelling reason whatsoever to use a proprietary Microsoft shell.

That's not quite true. There are Windows admins with tons of experience with Powershell but very little with scripting tools that are more native to Linux. Those Windows admins are beginning to use Linux more than you might suspect for a variety of use cases. Giving them a familiar toolset is not a bad thing. Heck at this point I have more familiarity with Powershell due to job duties than I do Linux scripting just by nature of the "9 to 5" use. I've written HUGE automation tools for our Windows servers that I'd love to easily port to Linux without complete rewrites.

Also -- if they're truly open sourcing, then by definition it isn't proprietary.

[jpp650]

Next step for MS: adquire Canonical and rebrand Ubuntu Linux as Microsoft Linux.

[Kushan]

Nobody wants Microsoft tools on Linux. There are 3+ decades of unix shell scripting knowledge and experience out there. There's no compelling reason whatsoever to use a proprietary Microsoft shell. All it does, is lock you into Microsoft's proprietary little ecosystem. Its clear Microsoft is trying to own some of this cloud market, but they're failing spectacularly. It is fun to watch them flounder though!

Yeah sure if you're 100% in linux land and only do linux, this isn't for you. However, if you're 90% in Windows land and do 10% Linux, then having the ability to use the same tools across both is compelling.

Likewise if the split is the other way around 90% Linux and 10% Windows, now you can use Bash.

Given the amount of stars on the official Linux Powerhsell github repo, I'd say some people are very interested. Just because you're not interested doesn't mean anything as your own personal desires are entirely anecdotal.

[bregma]

What's next with this Microsoft-Linux thing? Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!