That's not correct. In fact, supporting VC6 or gcc 2 costs a lot of CPU time for the testers.
I've never paid for my cpu time so I'm not sure what the issue is here. Tests for me start at about 10pm and they have approximately 10 hours to complete. It makes zero difference to me if it takes 2 hours or the full 10. If its still not complete by the time I get to the office then it'll probably just be nuked so I can get on with some work but that has not happened since I got my intial teething problems ironed out. To put it another way, if the developer chooses to support older compilers then I am more than happy to let it trigger tests. Sooner or later the old compilers will go away and all this discussion will be moot, we just need to keep arguing for another year or so;) Also looking at the regression summary no one is testing vanilla vc6 at the moment anyway so if anyone wants it give me a shout i'll setup for it as well. Martin