I heard about some reasons why open-sourcing software is a little difficult when MS open-sourced Windows LiveWriter as Open Live Writer. The reasoning is that a lot of the code/supporting tools that they use have non-permissive licenses and is also reused in other places which makes it an involved process to decouple it from the application. A good example is the Ribbon interface in OLW (which I think Scott Hanselman or someone got rewritten so that it could be open-sourced.).

Don't quote me on this though, because I wasn't a first party member of the conversations.

VB6 was awesome. Would be great if they could release it as open source.

RAD (rapid application development) of GUI applications was never easier and such a joy then with VB6. I remember I was very sad when they announced their vision for dotNet - it took them additional four years until dotNet was available in v1. In the meantime they lost all developers to HTML and PHP & co. Dreamweaver WYSIWYG was good enough.

Good point. I knew some people that moved to Delphi after VB5, which I always kicked myself for not doing. However, I look back at the apps I worked on and there was nothing there that that would look out of place today. Like any language, you can write messy code and design poor UI, but follow principles such as MVP, separate your data layer and such, it's still a good platform. Having said that, I'd not pick it for a new project today! I've fallen very hard for C#.

I don't really think VB6 has any chance at "another lease on life". It's missing way too many things that are a modern expectation today, and I think it's unlikely that open source contribution would build enough in to make it viable. (Especially if Microsoft didn't accept PRs, so there was no "official" open source project around updating it.)

But for people who have to support VB6 regardless of whether or not Microsoft open sources it, I'm sure it'd be pretty helpful.

We still have stuff out there that runs on COBOL, I have a feeling there will still be some life-dependent VB6 code out there somewhere in 2050.

I don't expect MS to ever open source it at this stage. For many years the biggest source of angst for those of us marooned in VB6 was the fear that our applications would no longer run in the 'next' version of windows and rewrites would be necessary. I don't think that fear is there any longer as each successive release has continued to support them. Now it's just slightly depressing to be working with a tool that was already due an update before the end of the last century.

I think Windows 10 still ships the VB runtime, but I'll go and check. Support I've come across it mainly down to third party components, be it some weird DLL or an ActiveX control that will not behave. A plain vanilla VB6 app that you might get as an ePos system or some internal CRUD tool should work 'just fine'.

Thinking about it, I am going to dig out my old VB6 VM image and have a play. Be interesting to see how many people out there would want support for VB6 apps today.

Oh, that would be pretty neat if they would open source VB6 or any previous version. I wrote a bunch of that code (like the VBX interface for example) and it would be fun to see it again.

It would be awesome. I know of some clients that would pay decent money to keep their VB6 apps running, if we had the source I'd happily be able to provide that service. Some of the DCOM+ stuff I wrote back in the day is still used in production as it just works. And it works really well.