@John:
What I mean by contributors are people that ... just join and never login.
These are mostly spambots, not humans. They never come back after 2 or 3 failed attempts to auto-login immediately. Otherwise they are 7 or 8 year-old children. The odds are approx. 100 to 1.
I think Microsoft's update system and zero day responses are pitiful for a company that large and with so many installs on the desktop.
Sure they are huge but probably not as huge as they should've been for so large a market share. IMHO they bit off more length they could chew right from the start, and their striving to expand to other neighboring markets so aggressively (which is generally a wise thing to do to minimize risks in the main business sphere) at the expense of their main client base may mean they don't regard the OS market as prevailing in their strategic future plans any more.
However I don't consider myself in a position to give reliable forecasts or analyses of businesses of such scope. By my own experience, business laws differ considerably at different levels of annual turnover in a corporate entity. I'd say there are at least four such levels of comprehension between what is more or less my sphere of competence, which is only $1Mln per annum or less, and a monster of Microsoft Corp.'s size.
... old guys with no friends ...
That way they become each other's friends which isn't bad at all.
I think the BASIC community shit on their own plate...
That's because there's no more any indie BASIC community to speak of user-wise. Many developers seem to be left one on one with their creations. Everyone's pretending they are doing their work exclusively at their leisure time and for their own pleasure while in fact only trying to disguise their disappointment and annoyance. This is of course not so. A worthwhile BASIC requires a lot of dedicated time and effort and can't be created in between walking a dog and taking a nap. I guess female babysitters would make perfect language developers ... if only they were males.
One would have to ask why aren't PowerBASIC users migrating to Mike's corner?
FBSL is not a PowerBASIC reflection. I used to admire Turbo Basic a lot in the past but only until I met Visual Basic. I own and am still keeping in my closet all the VB installation diskettes and disks starting with version 3. OTOH while pre-v3 FBSL was largely an extension of Windows batching techniques similar to AutoIt, FBSL v3 in its BASIC part was an attempt to get access to functionality not (readily) available in VB6 which was run-time independence, direct memory access, safe subclassing, and seamless integration with 3rd-party dynamic libraries.
Concurrently, it was a (successful) attempt to get rid of strong data typing inherent in all beginner-oriented BASIC's including VB6. FBSL is not (so much) for beginners, it's meant for people who know their way about programming in general, and Windows SDK, in particular - and that's the way VB6 itself has migrated over the years in the hands of dedicated and skillful VB6 users and modders. VB6 doesn't
de facto belong to MS any more. Its a very valuable Public Domain, and I don't regard warez installations of VB6 as real piracy any more even though I paid $365.00 for my first licensed VB3 diskette box at the local official MS dealer's.
At the same time, FBSL's BASIC remained totally Variant-based from ground up similar to VB6 and its Variant type is also COM- and VB6-compatible.
PowerBASIC is not an interpreter and it even hasn't been COM Variant-capable until very recently. Its long-time users are accustomed to static compilation and linking, are not inquisitive, and rely on their compiler to throw their own outstanding mistakes in their faces. Speed-wise, PowerBASIC is no better than any decent JIT compiler such as Charles' Oxygen or Mike's DynAsm or Mike's (with some attribution due to Fabrice Bellard) DynC. LuaJIT and Idle's just-in-time compilers are visibly poorer than these three in both the quality of machine code they generate and its resultant speed.
If you want to know my cincere opinion, Charles' OxygenBasic is the closest candidate to fill in the gap left over by PowerBASIC, may it R.I.P. (rest in pieces, PBCC and PBWin). OxygenBasic is well structured and easy to maintain, very versatile (e.g. OOP capable) even in its bare-bones form, 64-bit capable, fully Intel-style inline asm capable, statically compilable, and easily expandable to other platforms once translated to platform-independent ANSI C. It also generates excellent quality machine code for an unoptimising compiler. In other words, Charles alone did in a few years what the late Bob Zale with his company was trying to do all his lifetime.
Based on what Charles has put into Public Domain so far, I can easily visualize a team of two or three well-motivated
* programmers that would re-create PowerBASIC environment and vocabulary on top of bare-bones OxygenBasic in its entirety in a matter of four to six months, polish its 64-bit performance and port it to Linux and Mac in another six months, and have it beta-tested and certified for industrial use in yet another six to twelve months at the most, et voila...
In the meantime, if Charles wouldn't feel like taking part in such a commercial project directly, he could stay with his original reincarnation of public-domain OxygenBasic improving and polishing its functionality further or perhaps even implementing the entire ANSI C in it at the lowest (i.e. fullest) level of integration similar to its existing Intel-style assembly.
He should however understand that if he doesn't want such an obviously highly likely initiative to occur without his direct participation or control, he should re-license all his further activities immediately under the toughest GNU GPL possible. This will not however have any retroactive effect on the OxygenBasic sources available for public access until this Wednesday, April 30, 2014 inclusive.
Unlike my amateurish attempts at probabilistic studies of Microsoft's behavioral patterns higher above, this time it is a very likely prognosis from a man that used to run two own private companies at once - a 650 sq.m. Italian furniture showroom and a 250 sq.m. food/tobacco/wine store.
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* - When saying "well-motivated", I always imply cash flow, either immediate or projected.
... a guy in Bulgaria ...
In fact, matters are much worse than that. I do not live in Bulgaria that's only one step away from full integration into the European Union and only two steps away from becoming a NATO country.
I live in the Republic of
Belarus, a small country between Poland and Russia, that's under total control of the neighboring Russian Federation and that has been, and still continues to be, uncontestedly governed by Alexander Lukashenko -
the Last Dictator in Europe - for nearly twenty years.
The authoritarian Belarus is going to host the 2014 Ice Hockey World Championship starting this May 9 due to the "apolitical attitudes" of International Ice Hockey Federation's d*ckheads.
When comparing the strengths and benefits of SB, O2 and FBSL, you forgot the important category of being open or closed source.
In view of what I outlined higher above, closed sources may be a definitive virtue. Also, you should clearly understand that I am not in full control of FBSL copyrights and licensing. I'm however doing my best to combine copy protection with ease of access to the final product.
@Aurel:
Ahhh FBSL...yes it is good 
You can only accept my reciprocal grin. Both of us know what I'm talking about.
Burbon Basic BBC
That's yet another manifestation of man's eternal desire to play. I still remember my dear childhood teddybears - one brown, and the other one, pitch black, my favorite.
