This means that now anyone can implement PowerShell on any platform they want to. We know some of our most passionate customers sometimes work on platforms that can’t run PowerShell today, so when writing this specification, we wrote it in a platform neutral manner.
We hope to see implementations on all of your favorite platforms. This would benefit the industry, our partners, and our customers. We told you that you should learn PowerShell and we would do everything we could to make it the best investment you ever made. Specifying the language and enabling the community to implement it is yet another step in that direction.
It's interesting how many open source projects are expected to, and do, port their projects to Windows, but Microsoft expects the community to do the work of porting their projects to other platforms. Now obviously, Microsoft isn't usually the one doing the expecting, but Microsoft has a lot more resources than any random person doing a port in their freetime.
I remember when Apache wasn't available for Windows; and I remember when Microsoft "let" the Mono team write their Silverlight port.
This is all just marketing. They can say they are open and working with the community, but they are offering something empty: anyone who wants to use Powershell, or has experienced its value, is already working on Windows and most likely isn't interested in working on any other platform. And thus there is no one (or close to no one) who is both interested in doing and qualified to do a port. And I think Microsoft has shown their track record of working with the community only to continuously leave community products at least one step behind the moving target that is their "standard", often defined as whatever the latest from Microsoft offers. Everyone else's ports are seen a lesser because they are behind the "official" release.
Now, obviously, different implementations are good for the standard and market overall, and only serve to strengthen it from a diversity standpoint. But it's interesting that Microsoft is actively encouraging forks of their projects when they've, in the past, cited forks as a deficiency of open source.
We hope to see implementations on all of your favorite platforms. This would benefit the industry, our partners, and our customers. We told you that you should learn PowerShell and we would do everything we could to make it the best investment you ever made. Specifying the language and enabling the community to implement it is yet another step in that direction.
It's interesting how many open source projects are expected to, and do, port their projects to Windows, but Microsoft expects the community to do the work of porting their projects to other platforms. Now obviously, Microsoft isn't usually the one doing the expecting, but Microsoft has a lot more resources than any random person doing a port in their freetime.
I remember when Apache wasn't available for Windows; and I remember when Microsoft "let" the Mono team write their Silverlight port.
This is all just marketing. They can say they are open and working with the community, but they are offering something empty: anyone who wants to use Powershell, or has experienced its value, is already working on Windows and most likely isn't interested in working on any other platform. And thus there is no one (or close to no one) who is both interested in doing and qualified to do a port. And I think Microsoft has shown their track record of working with the community only to continuously leave community products at least one step behind the moving target that is their "standard", often defined as whatever the latest from Microsoft offers. Everyone else's ports are seen a lesser because they are behind the "official" release.
Now, obviously, different implementations are good for the standard and market overall, and only serve to strengthen it from a diversity standpoint. But it's interesting that Microsoft is actively encouraging forks of their projects when they've, in the past, cited forks as a deficiency of open source.