We are proud to announce that the entire DSC Resource Kit has been open-sourced on GitHub. This means that we will be iterating and releasing these DSC resources quicker than ever before. It also means that we will be collaborating more openly with the community by accepting GitHub pull requests into our code. 

For those of you who just want to consume the resources: we will no longer be publishing updates to the DSC Resource Kit resources on TechNet. Instead, we will publishing new updates directly to the PowerShell Gallery where they can be downloaded using PowerShellGet (which is now available downlevel to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 as part of the Windows Management Framework (WMF) 5.0 April 2015 Preview).

Note that these resources are still prefixed with an “x” to denote their experimental nature. They are only supported on a fix-forward cadence, meaning we will fix any reported bugs as best we can in future released versions. Note also that we will be taking contributions from the community on these resources, but these contributions will still be vetted by repository maintainers on the Microsoft PowerShell Team before they are accepted into the official Microsoft versions of the modules. 

For those of you who want to help contribute to our open-source efforts: not only are you free to fork and modify the DSC resources for your own purposes, but we will also be accepting contributions in the form of GitHub pull requests. You can submit changes to our code, tests, and documentation where they will later be annotated, edited, and/or approved by a member of the PowerShell Team. You can also file a bug or feature request in the form of a GitHub Issue, upon which a Microsoft developer or a community member may make a commit to address your issue. For more information on our contribution guidelines and git branching model, check out CONTRIBUTIONS.md.

The reaction thus far (even prior to this blog post) has been remarkable, with an outpouring of our community filing issues and submitting pull requests. We’d like to publicly thank many members of the PowerShell community, both externally and at Microsoft, for their contributions to the DSC Resource Kit and our open-source modules. Michael Greene, Mike Hendrickson, Dave Wyatt, Steven Murawski, all the folks at PowerShell.org, and many, many more: thank you for bootstrapping and continuing to improve these DSC resources.

From across the PowerShell Team, our hope is to continue contributing to the open-source community. As of today, we’ve also open-sourced the PowerShell Script Analyzer (a tool for validating and analyzing your scripts, modules, and DSC resources for best practices) and the PowerShell Package Management (formerly OneGet) DSC resources.