Replies

> There is no reason it won't run on other systems... There is nothing preventing Apple or anyone else from porting it to OSX or any Nix based system, or even MVS for that matter, except a bad case of NIH.

In that case, we can expect to see it on other systems, based on demand and interest. Apple wouldn't bother, I'm sure. But NIH has never been a barrier to the open source community developing non-Windows versions of Microsoft's programs, even in the face of obstacles like a) no source, b) no spec, c) threat of lawsuits, d) threat of criminal prosecution. It's simply a question of the program's functions being sufficiently desired by people who choose to not run Windows, or who wish to avoid paying Microsoft's price for the official MS product.

There certainly have been a number of open source development projects that found insufficient interest -- "solutions in search of a problem" -- and they died out. Such is the nature of open source projects.

According to the Pash code.google page:

Pash is an high level programming language well suited for system administration tasks and automation. Pash closely follows the syntax and APIs of Microsoft PowerShell™. Pash includes a rich interactive command line environment as well as a hostable scripting engine for third party applications.
Pash can currently run on the .NET Framework 2.0 or higher or Mono 1.9.1 or higher. Pash was tested on Linux, Mac OS X, Windows XP and Windows Vista. All contributors to the project are welcome, or any help whatsoever. We are especially looking for people with expertise at building parsers.

There is "No Activity" shown on the project.

So it seems to me that Microsoft could further the adoption of Powershell by helping the Pash project come to life again. I can't think of a reason not to, since for very little outlay of their substantial resources (MS thinks nothing of dropping half a billion dollars on failed marketing and advertising) it would spread the word that Powershell is great and Microsoft designs good stuff. It would also improve MS's standing in the open source community and help offset Ballmer's years of blathering about it being a "cancer" and trying to crush it.

> I believe the lack of formal published specs was mostly responsible, but that's no longer an obstacle.

Then Pash should take off, eh? I'll check back to the Pash page from time to time. If you know of another page that documents progress on the project, please let me know. Thanks!