Since its inception in 2002 PowerShell has been deeply influenced and improved by the passion and needs of our community. As an example, 80 contributors filed bugs and issues on the \u201calpha\u201d release.\u00a0Since that time we, together, have built a strong PowerShell community that supports each other, provides Summits and Conferences and gives great feedback to the product team at Microsoft.<\/p>\n
Satya\u2019s new leadership and customer-focused mindset has encouraged and empowered us to do even more with our community. Last year we started a number of successful community initiatives, such as the PowerShell Home Page, the PowerShell Gallery, and various Open Source projects.<\/p>\n
Today we are thrilled to move to the next level and provide PowerShell as an open source project on GitHub, available on Windows, Linux and macOS! The official announcement blog can be found here<\/a> and the PowerShell Webinar is here<\/a>. This is the most dramatic change since the release of V1 so of course, we had to record the moment for history, here is the video <\/a>of the team making the repo public!<\/p>\n Last year we started down this path by contributing to a number of open source projects (e.g. OpenSSH) and open sourcing a number of our own components including DSC resources<\/a>. We learned that working closely with the community, in the code and with our backlog and issues list, allowed us prioritize and drive the development much more responsively. We\u2019ve always worked with the community but shifting to a fine-grain, tight, feedback loop with the code, energized the team and allowed us to focus on the things that had the most impact for our customers and partners. Now we are going big by making PowerShell itself an open source project and making it available on Mac OS X, Ubuntu, CentOS\/RedHat and others in the future.<\/p>\n You can always go to the PowerShell Home Page<\/a> for information, updates or links about PowerShell and our overall efforts. However, for those who just want to dive in, here some direct links to help you get going right away:<\/p>\n All PowerShell development is now done in the open on GitHub at PowerShell\/PowerShell<\/a> with direct community involvement. \u00a0You can find the governance<\/a> process defined in GitHub, which describes how to raise issues, contribute to the project, and propose designs via the standard Request for Change process. The governance document identifies the roles, responsibilities, and processes so that contributions can be smoothly incorporated into the product.\u00a0 We modelled our governance process on some of the best practices of other open source projects and after consulting with a number of partner companies and PowerShell MVPs. That said, we are still in learning mode and welcome feedback.<\/p>\n As we move forward, we will work closely with the community to learn and improve our approach to make PowerShell the best tool to manage anything from anywhere. While PowerShell will have been shipping for 10 years on November 14th<\/sup>, in many ways this is the start of a new journey. Your contributions<\/a>, thoughts and experiences are welcomed and needed. Help us get it right!<\/p>\n We have been working with several internal and external partners to prepare for this release, including .NET Core, Azure, Chef, VMWare, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform to name a few. Several of them have provided demos already.<\/p>\n The PowerShell open source project is currently at an \u201calpha\u201d level of stability and is community supported. In the future, we will deliver an official Microsoft released version of PowerShell based on open source to anyone running a supported version of Windows or *nix. The timing of the official Microsoft version will be based upon community input and business needs.<\/p>\n There is a list of Known Issues<\/a> we have already identified that you may want to review.<\/p>\n There are also a set of investments that we know we need to drive moving forward in this area. These include:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Many users are familiar with PowerShell, but for those of you who desire to start, the Learning PowerShell<\/a> doc is a great place to begin your introduction. It contains links to several other articles to help you get going.<\/p>\n Today marks the beginning a new community-driven PowerShell development process for a wide range of platforms. However, the focus on open source does not change our commitment to Windows, or to our existing PowerShell customers. PowerShell remains the hub of management capabilities for the Windows operating systems. What this move does is enable at least three things:<\/p>\n We view this as a very strong win-win.<\/p>\n In order to maintain clarity and consistency in communication, the following is the terminology we will use for this technology:<\/p>\nSo, where\u2019s the cool stuff?<\/u><\/h2>\n
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