Microsoft to open source the VB6 Language (NOT Visual Studio)

[Josh]

At Tech-Ed this week, Microsoft told its Most Valued Professionals that the company is open sourcing the code to Visual Basic 6.0 on its CodePlex community development site before the end of June.

Roy Osherove, an early member of ALT.NET community, and TDD specialist, broke the news on Twitter: " Microsoft announces to mvps at #msteched that VB6 will be released as open source on codeplex end of june! w00t."

An MVP in attendance at the Tech-Ed meeting confirmed the announcement. He said Microsoft is planning to release only the VB6 language on CodePlex – not Visual Studio or related tooling.

Osherove followed up with another tweet: "Damn. VB6 going open source may be the one interesting thing I've heard come out of #msteched so far."

Osherove is not alone. "Visual Basic 6 being released as an open source project on CodePlex is a very interesting prospect," said Joe Kunk, a Microsoft MVP for Visual Basic and the On VB columnist for Visual Studio Magazine. "There's still a very significant presence of VB6 applications in companies today.  Having VB6 continue to live, even as open source, will give those companies some piece of mind until the VB6 applications can be rewritten in .NET."

Derived from the BASIC programming language, Visual Basic was introduced for Windows development in 1991 and MS-DOS the following year. Visual Basic was replaced with a .NET version in 2002 when the managed framework was released. The final release, Visual Basic 6.0  appeared in 1998. Microsoft support, outside of the runtimes, ended in March 2008.

Source

[Renegade]

Hmmm... Will it be open sourced as GPL, LGPL, BSD?

Nope:

CORRECTED: Microsoft Strongly Denies VB 6 Open Source Rumors, Sources Retract Statement

Microsoft's Doug Seven, director of product management for Visual Studio tools and languages, strongly denied a story reported here earlier that Microsoft planned to open source VB 6.

"There's no more solid source than me. It's not true," he said.

The statement was in response to a story published earlier on this site that said that the rumor of VB6 being opened source, first heard at Tech-Ed then spread on Twitter, was confirmed by an independent source.

Our source has since retracted that statement. The original poster on twitter has also retracted his statement.

RDN apologizes for the error.