Nearly one decade and a half into the 21st century, Microsoft has announced that it is finally going to enter the 20th century by offering SSH support for its PowerShell offering.
This move means that users will in future also be able to access and administer other systems remotely using the SSH protocol.
In its implementation Microsoft will be backing the OpenSSH project, which is popular in the open source world; MS wants to join the project and contribute its own code. It is still not certain when the initial results of this work can be expected as things are currently in an early planning phase.
Microsoft becoming more open to open source
MS’ blog post also reports that the developer team has been attempting to extend PowerShell with SSH functionality for quite some time. This proposal was made as early as the first two versions of PowerShell, but was rejected. “Changes in the management and culture” of the company have now encouraged the development team to attempt it again. Pressure from the community and several requests via social media have resulted in the idea now having full senior management support.
The company has become more amenable to open source ever since Satya Nadella took over running the software giant and as a consequence the complete .NET framework has been released as open source.