I would like to go ahead and say THANK YOU to the four of you who have already donated, KR155E, dasi, BenRPG and DogP.

I have faith (and really hope) that the rest of you enjoi the disks and follow through.

I’d like to hop on a list as well, I’d like to try my hand at making a little demo and running it on my system.

KR155E wrote:
Awesome! I just sent $20. Please PM me, or post here if you don’t mind, how we should proceed with this.

I feel like you guys don’t really have a reason to lie to me saying you would care to donate and then not. So I’m just going to send the files to you and let you decide what you want to do with them.

Everything has been dumped, scans to follow.

They are at my post office! I should have them up tomorrow afternoon / evening (in Nashville, TN, USA).

Today I paid for everything and once it’s all confirmed I will put in the order to have it shipped! If anyone is serious about donating towards it, my Paypal address is gapetto @ gmail . com and I hope to have them in a few weeks time. I am very excited!

That said… I’d definitely donate… and like you said, it’d likely get leaked if you tried to keep it totally private, but you’d probably get more donations if you did something like donors of $20 (or more) get the disks at donation time… then the disks get released to the public in 30 days (and ask that donors not share until you release it). Knowing that the disks will be released shortly should make most people feel fine about keeping them private, but give some benefit to the (impatient) paying crowd. And the community is pretty small that only the hardcore people (that actually care about seeing the contents, i.e. dev’rs) would donate anyway. There’s very little on the dev kit disks that a casual VB fan would be interested in looking at.

That sounds like the best route to go then. I didn’t know how big the VB “scene” was so I didn’t know if it would work or not.

A “community dump” is basically what you described. People donate towards something to help buy it and then get it released. Typically whatever is released is just generally released to everyone because it would be leaked anyway, not to mention it typically is only of value to a select few.

My reason for collecting donation is to help recoup the lost cost/value of the disks. They only sold for so much because no one can go online and download them and after they’re released, anyone with Photoshop/GIMP and the files can make them. That means I bought what turns into a few dollars worth of diskettes and labels after I share them with everyone. So in the end, I’m still out money no matter what as I am not after the full cost.

I haven’t received the disks yet so I’m not sure about the disks, but I imagine they’re mostly revisions to the same code.