Quote Originally Posted by techgnome View Post
Ok, my opinion - I think you're a Quixotic fool for trying to tilt this windmill.
This sentence should be automatically added to any thread on this topic.

As someone who still enjoys working with VB6, I'm not sure why VB6 developers think that open-sourcing VB6 would solve anything. For every successful proprietary to open-source conversion (e.g. Netscape to Firefox), there are a thousand counter-examples where the open-source version either withered on the vine, or got actively worse. Open-sourcing a closed codebase is a monumental task. It takes tens of thousands of man-hours from both developers and lawyers, and no company is going to invest that money unless there's a clear ROI. In the case of VB6, there is effectively zero ROI. It's just not gonna happen.

I could share many links on this topic, but here's a short and simple one, for the uninitiated:

Open sourcing is not easy

Even if Microsoft did go to all that effort (lol), it's not like VB6 users could do anything with the resulting codebase. VB6 wasn't written in Visual Basic. You'd need a team of highly skilled C++ and ASM developers to do anything meaningful with the source code, and I doubt you're going to find a bunch of top-notch C++ programmers willing to modernize a Visual Basic codebase.

I'd honestly be curious to know how many VB6 developers have ever even contributed to an open-source project. Open-source doesn't work when the community is a bunch of entitled developers who simply want something for free, and unfortunately, I get the feeling that 99+% of VB6 petition-signers fall into that category.