* Forwarded from GOLDED.BETA by andrew clarke (3:635/727.4).
* Originally by: Odinn Sorensen (2:236/77), 01 Jul 96 20:09.
* Originally to: All.

{at}MSGID: 2:236/77 31d830eb
{at}TID: GE 1.11+
* Crossposted in GOLDED
* Crossposted in GOLDED.BETA
* Crossposted in GOLDED.SITES
* Crossposted in GOLDED_R23.PNT
* Crossposted in R20_GOLDED
* Crossposted in GOLDED.GER
* Crossposted in GOLDBETA.GER

Hello All.

This is a very sad day for me. Today I was forced to close my company,
Goldware International.

When I started Goldware International in 1991, I knew very little about
accounting and tax rules, and because of my ignorance I managed to build up
a substantial tax debt. Ever since my errors were discovered some years
ago, my economy has been very difficult. Then in fall/winter 1995, my
income (GoldED registrations) started a relentless dive toward zero. In may
1996 it had fallen to an all-time low of 1/10 of the average of previous
years. I could no longer live on my business alone, so I considered some of
my options: A job on the side, an education on the side, or social security
on the side. I chose the latter as the best solution if I wanted to keep my
business running, but I was turned down. After further and very hard
consideration, I have chosen to close my business entirely and instead
restart my education. Having my business at the same time as an education
or a job would be too stressful and both would suffer.

So how does this affect GoldED?  When I don't have a business, I cannot
take payment for registrations. Therefore I have decided to change GoldED
from Shareware to Freeware status as of today. Maybe some day I will be
able to change it back to Shareware, but that is likely to be in the far
future. As of today, I no longer accept payment, and (to the best of my
abilities) I will return any payment I may receive after today. I cannot
refund any payments made to me before today, sorry. I have instructed all
my registration sites to return any registration payments that they receive
on or after 1. july 1996. I cannot guarantee that you can receive a 100%
full refund if you have sent a payment to a registration site on or after
today. The reg.site may have had costs associated with receiving the
payment or other circumstances. Please be understanding and don't blow this
up to a big problem. Please also be aware that I have cancelled *all*
GoldED registration sites today. This means that as of today, there are
*no* GoldED registration sites at all. Note that it may be a while before
the now former reg.sites remove their reg.site banners, orderforms etc. I
hope that nobody will feel bad if they *just* registered before today and
can't get a refund. I'm sorry.

I am very grateful for your support until now, and I will do what I can to
continue work on GoldED even as a Freeware product. However, my education
will take first priority over everything else. My prior experience with
having a full-time job or education at the same time as working on GoldED
showed me that I can't do both very well. So I will put my main energies
into the education and do as much work on GoldED as I can in my spare time.
Of course I would also like to have a life, so GoldED may take third place
or even lower in periods. My education starts in early/mid august.

Future plans for GoldED: Actually not much has changed - my intentions are
the same, except that I will have less time to work on it. I am still
working on the advanced features and restructuring of GoldED
"Firebird" v3.00. The next public release will be the recently
announced GoldED 2.51, which is basically a slightly more stable GoldED
2.50 with the features and fixes of 3.00.Alpha1 incorporated. GoldED 2.51
will be released in the usual versions for DOS, 386 and OS/2 plus a new
Win32 textmode version for Windows 95 and NT. I am still working on
finalizing 2.51, but it should be released early this month (july). I am
also working on a true Windows version as well as an OS/2 PM version.
Currently my GUI development work is still very much in the learning stage,
but I'm making pretty good progress. It shouldn't bee too long before I can
begin to show running versions of my design studies.

The coming GoldED 2.51 and future releases of 3.xx will have a built-in
registration key, so that you won't have to go to me or a reg.site to
register the program. Until then, I am releasing publicly a 100% free
registration key, which will work in all versions of all current and older
GoldED releases. Here it is:

  ;SERIALNO    7777DK7
  REGISTERNAME Everyone
  REGISTERKEY  731E74072408340421751F527354752C1E0F

So, to make your GoldED registered, simply copy these three lines into your
GOLDED.CFG or into a file named GOLDED.KEY.

If you have a key already, please keep it safe - it may be worth something
in the future when/if GoldED becomes Shareware again. In the mean time,
feel free to use the free key instead, if you decide to change to a version
that your current key is not valid for.

I will stay tuned to the GoldED echoes and I will also continue to maintain
the WWW and FTP sites at winet.dk. My e-mail address is still
odinn{at}image.dk, but the odinn{at}ibm.net address has been cancelled, and I
don't know how long I can keep the odinn{at}winboss.dk address. My BBS and
mailer is still open at the usual number. My voice phone number has
changed, because I had to close a line to save money. My new voice number
is: +45-58162225.

Bye for now.

Odinn

-+- GoldED/W32 2.51.A0620+
 + Origin: http://www.winet.dk/goldware * e-mail: odinn{at}image.dk (2:236/77)
{at}PATH: 236/77 341/19 14 70 270/101 396/1 2401/0 713/700 888 711/808 50/99
{at}PATH: 635/544 727

--- GoldED/2 3.00.Alpha1+

SD®¯Ý¡
--- Squish/386 v1.11