A few minutes back, I read on Slashdot that Microsoft is open sourcing Visual Basic 6. Wow! If they do that, that is a huge and pleasant surprise from Microsoft - after all, so many developers wants Microsoft to make Visual Basic 6 open source.. This is what Redmond Developer, the website which broke that news, wrote:

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.

However, it looks like this is just a rumor and have no truth behind it. Dough Seven, who is the Senior Product Manager for Visual Studio Team System at Microsoft, has denied that Microsoft is open sourcing VB6. He tweeted that the rumors that Microsoft is open sourcing VB6 is "simply not true".

The rumor was started on Twitter by Rob Osherove who tweeted:

Microsoft announces to mvps at #msteched that VB6 will be released as open source on codeplex end of june! w00t

He obviously was joking when he tweeted that because he followed that tweet with another which is supposed to be the video of the official announcement but is actually linked to a video of Rick Astley's song  "Never Gonna Give You Up". He was simply rickrolling.

here's a more official video of announcement of VB6 going open source from #msteched http://bit.ly/79qHlZ

Anyway it is a good thing that Microsoft killed the silly rumor before it got out of hand.