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Microsoft Urged to Open Source Classic Visual Basic (i-programmer.info)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the losing-controls dept.

"On the 25th anniversary of classic Visual Basic, return it to its programmers..." reads the plea at UserVoice.com from Sue Gee -- drawing 85 upvotes. "The new Microsoft claims to back open source, why not in this case? There is no need for Microsoft to do any more work on the code base - simply open source it and allow the community to keep it alive."

In an essay at i-programmer.info, Gee shares a video of young Bill Gates building an app with Visual Basic in 1991, and complains that in the 25 years since Microsoft has open sourced .NET Core and the .NET Compiler Platform Roslyn, "but it has explicitly refused to open source VB6." She notes that Friday Visual Basic's program manager announced a "Visual Basic Silver Anniversary Celebratiathon," promising he's reaching out to the VB team members from the last 25 years for a behind-the-scenes retrospective, and adding "this is a party, so feel free to be interactive."

"What the post glosses over is that this history was blighted by the fork in the road that was .NET and that many Visual Basic fans are highly unsatisfied that the programming environment they cherished is lost to them..." writes Gee. "Vote for the proposal not because you want to use VB6 or that you think it is worth having -- Vote for it because a company like Microsoft should not take a language away from its users."

7 of 331 comments (clear)

  1. ummm.no. by lord+merlin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Let it die. It's a terrible language and it should die a death. don't open source it or you'll just encourage a new wave of cheapskate programmers to start learning bad habits and producing crappy code.

    1. Re:ummm.no. by hairyfeet · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Wow...elitist much? There is absolutely nothing wrong with VB6, just because you have seen sloppy VB code don't mean shit as I can go over to stack overflow and find examples of shitty code in any of the new hip languages that you like.

      VB6 is great for one REALLY specific job, which just happens to be a job that small to medium businesses require quite often, which is "make a quick and simply GUI to a DB" and it does that job very very well. In fact I've never seen anything else that could whip off a GUI to a DB as easily or as quickly as VB.

      So instead of being elitist why not just except that every language has a place and it serves NO purpose to not open up the code, or are you just against open source in general? Because frankly I find it quite shocking that so many here would actually be against opening the source to ANY code that is now proprietary,what happened to /. being a big pro FOSS site? I really can't picture someone asking RMS if VB should be released under say the GPL he would go "Naw fuck that shit man, some things shouldn't be given to the people!" can you?

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  2. While we're at it... by AmazingRuss · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... lets let smallpox out of those freezers.

  3. They may not be able to open source it by jonwil · · Score: 5, Informative

    Its entirely possible classic VB contains code that Microsoft licensed from 3rd parties and is unable to open source.

  4. Exactly! by tlambert · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Businesses aren't the ones demanding the source for VB6.

    Exactly! What cashflow strapped small business with 15 employees running on Windows XP with a hardware firewall between them and the net, with a huge amount of Microsoft and third party components, all glued together with VB6, wouldn't want to:

    * Upgrade 15 old machines so they could install a 16th machine
    * Have to have someone "upgrade" their entire business IT infrastructure to .NET (hope it works!)
    * Re-buy all the components they were using
    * For the components they were using that aren't available on .NET, pay someone to rewrite them from scratch
    * Convert all their historical data
    * Replace all their old printers, since old printers never have drivers in new OS's
    * Retrain all their employees on the new stuff
    * Hope there aren't any business-ending "quirks" in the new code

    I mean who wouldn't love that?!?!?

    ...wait. I'm beginning to see the problem here...

    1. Re:Exactly! by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 5, Insightful

      VB6 is simply a tool to get shit done, quickly and easily. If you couldn't do it quickly and easily, then it was the wrong tool for the job. People in the real world use software to get their real work done. You're thinking of VB6 as an end-product rather than as a tool, which is where your analogy goes off the rails.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
  5. Why Mainframes Live [Re:Exactly!] by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Not necessarily.

    Most Mainframe programs from the late 1960's work with little or no changes. You can complain about COBOL and JCL, but at least a mainframe shop doesn't have to rewrite programs from scratch every 15 years or so for every new programming or UI fad style that comes along.

    Maybe it cost more up-front to use the clunky mainframe languages, but if you factor in the cost of rewriting every 15 years to keep up with the Joneses, then the mainframe approach perhaps is cheaper over the long run. And more reliable.

    --
    Table-ized A.I.