[friedman23]

It's not bash. It's proprietary garbage. It's not what I'm going to be using on my production servers. Why it exists? I have no clue.

[sidpatil]

I'm not sure what you're referring to specifically when you say "proprietary", but most of PowerShell is available under the MIT license.

https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell#legal-and-licensing

[pjmlp]

Hey Apple stuff is also proprietary garbage, why are you using it for your development work then?

Two weights, two measures?

[rbrtl]

Apple's terminal environment is POSIX-like. PowerShell was always a bit of a lame duck, or Microsoft wouldn't have bothered with WSL to get real power users to stick with their platform.

[pjmlp]

Powershell is the only mainstream shell that is close enough to the Xerox PARC workstations REPL experience.

As for WSL you got it all wrong, after the failure of Project Astoria (running Android apps on UWP), Microsoft found a business opportunity in selling Windows to folks that buy Apple devices to do GNU/Linux work instead of supporting Linux OEMS, unhappy with Apple no longer caring for them as they no longer need their money.

So they picked up the infrastructure, redone it as WSL, and start selling the feature to that crowd, now they can get the hardware that Apple doesn't sell them, while keep paying proprietary garbage vendors instead of supporting the vendors in the Linux community.