PowerShell Pro Tools - Sunsetting and Open Source

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PowerShell Pro Tools end of life and open source

We are sunsetting PowerShell Pro Tools as a paid and supported product. The end of sales will be October 1st, 2024. After this time, we will no longer issue new licenses or process renewals for the product. Support and maintenance will continue through October 1st, 2025 for users that have an active subscription or support agreement. The product will be open-sourced and released from the GitHub repository. Ironman Software will continue to host and publish binaries to the PowerShell Gallery and Visual Studio Marketplace.

Decision and Alternatives

PowerShell Tools and PowerShell Pro Tools, in one form or another, have been actively developed by Adam Driscoll and Ironman Software since 2011. During this time, we’ve seen the platform evolve over various versions of Visual Studio, branch out into VS Code and PSScriptPad and provide scripting support to millions of users. PowerShell Pro Tools was once the sole revenue source for Ironman Software. As PowerShell Universal has grown in popularity, and users have moved to alternative scripting tools, we’ve seen the use of PowerShell Pro Tools diminish over the years.

What was once 100% of our revenue has fall to less than 15% and will likely continue to decline. We have made the decision to sunset the product so that we can focus our entire team on PowerShell Universal maintenance, support and development. By simplifying our product offering, we can better focus our limited resources on the most successful parts of our business and provide the best product and support to our customers.

If you are looking for supported alternatives to the PowerShell Pro Tools product, please consider the following:

• SAPIEN PowerShell Studio
• Microsoft PowerShell Extension for VS Code

Open-Source

Part of our sunsetting effort for PowerShell Pro Tools will include open sourcing the code base. Sometime between now and end-of-sales, we will publish a freely available version of the toolset and accompanying GitHub repository. At the time of release, we will no longer sell personal licenses as they do not include support. We will also be putting an initiative in place to be better stewards of our open source projects by providing resources to ensure that they are successful with better meantime to issue and pull request closures.

The PowerShell Pro Tools repository has already been created. We will be migrating issues and, over the next few months, publishing the source code.

Community

We will continue to host the PowerShell Pro Tools community on our forums and respond when available.

Conclusion

If you have any questions about our decision or the roadmap for sunsetting, please contact our support team.