By this measure, we shouldn't be using X or Wayland because they're MIT.

> pipe-and-filter vs loaded DLLs

At first I didn't understand what you were referring to, but I realized you were talking about cmdlets. In that regard, PowerShell is more like a scripting language than it is like a traditional Unix shell.

The more "Unix-like" approach would be to write thin command-line wrappers around the libraries you want to use. If I'm not mistaken, this is how projects like LAME and FFmpeg are implemented.