FUDBuster: Microsoft Ends Free Support for VB 6

FUDBust: There are more than 3 million Visual Basic developers worldwide, and more than 2,200 of them have put together a petition to preserve Classic VB--a programming language that's been in use since 1991. Microsoft has rejected the petition, so beginning this month, developers must pay extra for VB support. Microsoft will cease mainstream support of VB 6 altogether in less than seven years.

It's hard to imagine how the world's biggest software company could be so oblivious to the way applications work. Old apps never die. IBM and other vendors have supported some older languages and applications for 30 years or more--and made money doing so. What's more, developers don't like to rewrite programs they've already debugged. Forty-four percent of VB developers are not using Visual Basic .Net--which works very differently from VB 6--and many of them are not yet trained to use the new environment, says research firm Evans Data. Maybe they'll decide to use Java on Linux instead.