Microsoft today released its PowerShell scripting language and command-line shell as open source. The project joins .NET and the Chakra JavaScript engine as an MIT-licensed open source project hosted on GitHub.

Alpha version prebuilt packages of the open source version are available for CentOS, Ubuntu, and OS X, in addition, of course, to Windows. Additional platforms are promised in the future.

Announcing the release, Microsoft's Jeffrey Snover described the impetus for the move: customers liked the use of PowerShell for management, remote control, and configuration but didn't like that it was Windows-only. To address this concern, Microsoft first had to bring .NET, and then PowerShell itself, to Linux and other platforms. Snover says that PowerShell will be extended so that remote scripting can natively use ssh as its transport instead of Windows remoting.

Longer term, this move should mean that Windows' and Azure's management tools such as Operations Management Suite and Desired State Configuration will have much greater reach, allowing a common set of tools and skills to reach a far greater range of systems.