Is Visual Basic 6 (1998) Abandonware??

[JoshuaKoe]

I found a Visual Basic 6 ISO image from winworldpc.com.

I was wondering if vb6 is abandonware already or is this piracy and unsafe?

 

https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-visual-bas

 

Thanks!

[Master Disaster]

Winworld have a full DMCA program and they do abide by applications made by developers. For example Microsoft asked them to remove images of Office 2000 & Windows XP from the site, within a week they were all gone.

 

Microsoft don't care about VB6 any more.

[da na]

Seems to be abandonware if Microsoft hasn't done anything about it.

[JoshuaKoe]

ah alright! Thanks for the help!

[Krzysiu]

I don't quite agree with comments here.

1) Abandonware is still an act of piracy, because such software is still copyrighted. It's the informal status indicating chances of persecution - more or less chances, not safe vs. unsafe or legal vs. illegal. It's always kind of unsafe and always illegal.

2) Microsoft probably won't actively pursue persecution in this case, but if you'd get busted by organization like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSA_(The_Software_Alliance), which represents interest of MS (and other developers) I bet they won't care about informal status, which is abandonware, but they would make same steps as with any other MS software. Depending on country, it would be the same case for home users. So no, you are not safe.

3) sending/not sending DCMA doesn't change much. After all they wanted XP removed, but MS doesn't actively pursue home users of illegal copies - nor for XP, nor for Windows 10.

4) if they really wouldn't care, it would be available legally for free. But it's not.

 

Generally it all depends on your use. Of course, as I said, it will be always illegal, but I'd call it safe for private, especially educational use, but unsafe for commercial use. If you want to modify an ancient source code for private use, nobody will care, unless your PC would get nicked for some reason - then the year of production or current interests of MS won't matter.

 

In other words: piracy is generally safe, no matter if it's a new software or old - a tiny tiny minority of users will ever get persecuted. But "generally" doesn't mean you are 100% safe. If you'd need such 100% safeness, check out university/educational licenses from Microsoft. And if you don't need 100%, then no matter if it's VB6 or newest version, you'll be probably safe.