[ixian]

It's always nice to hear from people who have too much time on their hands.

A) You obviously want to try vbportal. If you really didn't care, you wouldn't have bothered with this tirade.

B) You see that they are asking for either money or programming help to actually get the beta. Since apparently programming help is beyond you, money is the way to go.

C) You are offended you can't get this hack for free.

I'm thinking I pretty much have your train of thought down. Then you decide to vent, and since you know no one will care about random venting, you try to throw some legalize into the whole mess to try and make your whining seem legitimate. The fact is, you don't even know whether he pays taxes on the money he receives or not. You just assume he doesn't because apparently that's how you would act.

The fact is, Bill Jones is a retired man working on this hack on his own. It is a massive hack - far more complicated than any you will find here - and the time required to build and maintain it, on top of answering questions (he has a forum with 10,000 posts, most of them asking for help - compare that to some of the hacks here) is too much to keep up with. Therefore, he limits access to people who can either A) Help him out with development and support or B) help out financially - I'm sure the cost of hosting his site alone is hundreds a month. Finally, as he has announced, he will release a stable beta to the public when he feels it's ready, and it won't cost anything.

I find this to be an entirely reasonable approach. I find your whining to be disgusting. Frankly, I am glad I don't have to deal with questions from you regarding vbportal. If you are that upset about it, how about you try and write one yourself? Let us know how it pans out.