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6 Reasons To License Software Under the (A/L)GPL
Henry V .009 writes with a link to Zed Shaw's "newest rant," which gives a cogent description of his reasons for choosing the not-always-popular GPL for his own code: "Honestly, how many of you people who use open source tell your boss what you're using? How many of you tell investors that your entire operation is based on something one guy wrote in a few months? How many of you out there go to management and say, 'Hey, you know there's this guy Zed who wrote the software I'm using, why don't we hire him as a consultant?' You don't. None of you. You take the software, and use it like Excalibur to slay your dragon and then take the credit for it. You don't give out any credit, and in fact, I've ran into a vast majority of you who constantly try to say that I can't code as a way of covering your ass."
Well, for instance, there's lots and lots of VB6 code out there that became obsolete when MS dropped it. The .NET version is different enough that large apps can't be translated and need to be rewritten.
Actually VB6 code is still getting written even today, but it's a dangerous proposition. There's no guarantee it'll run on future Windows versions. Especially there's no guarantee that the OCX you need will work on future Windows version.
COBOL is an exception because it was used in important systems developed entirely in-house with full source available.
But VB6 isn't like that. A vast majority of programs need some OCX or another that performs a crucial task. And the VB code itself is just glue (something every VB book likes to point out). Many VB apps are completely uninteresting and say, use an OCX to interface with some specialized piece of hardware, another OCX to present data (some fancy grid control for instance), and a database. If any of that stops working, you're screwed. And chances are those companies that made that stuff are now gone or uninterested in maintaining it.
Compare for instance, Perl or C. Perl isn't that popular anymore, but it's still actively worked on. Even if development stopped, the source would still be there.