Summary: Another misleading piece (a puff piece) from Beta News helps Microsoft openwash itself and promote proprietary software, proprietary APIs, etc.

AN OCCASIONAL Microsoft boosting site, Beta News, published a misleading PR piece that reads like it was ghostwritten by Microsoft (not just embedding Microsoft quotes).

Suffice to say, when Microsoft talks about "open source" one need to take a boulder of salt; in this particular case, as in many other cases, it is Windows only, DirectX-dependent, etc. It is more like openwashing than "open source" because without proprietary software this code just won't run. In other words, you have to be a paying client of Microsoft (paying a bunch of thugs) to use the code and you have to support Microsoft APIs. To quote right from the source: "Version 5.1 Gold runs on Windows 7 or Windows 8, in either 32- or 64-bit mode, depending on your operating system. It also supports native DirectX 11, DirectX 10, and has some support for down-level DirectX 9 hardware running through the DirectX 11 API."

Yeah, that has "open source" all over it!

Perhaps it's time for Beta News to give coverage to some real Free software projects rather than drive Microsoft's agenda. ⬆