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- KiXtart 2001 Hold-up
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The highly anticipated release of KiXtart 2001 has been held up by
Microsoft's legal department for a couple months now. Apparently, the
reason for the hold-up is the kind and generous heart of the KiXtart
developer, Ruud van Velson. Having worked for the past 6 years to
enhance the widely used scripting language, van Velson has never asked
for a price tag to be attached to the product. However, in the 2001
release, he has asked Microsoft to approve his request to distribute the
product as "CareWare".

When asked about this, van Velsen responded by saying "... I have been
considering the option of releasing KiXtart 2001 as so-called 'CareWare'
(aka 'Charity-Ware'). Effectively, all this would mean is that the
documentation would include an appeal to the user to voluntarily donate
an arbitrary amount of money to a tbd charity. Note that the
functionality of the software itself would not be affected in any way."

KiXtart 2001 would not be the first product to implement this type of
licensing program, but is obviously the first to come from Microsoft.
Naturally, this goes against the grain of the Redmond, WA company. In
the meantime, thousands of systems administrators world-wide are
anxiously awaiting the KiXtart 2001 release. Some of the benefits of
this latest build include:

· Full support for the new Windows 2000 groups (universal and nested
groups)
· COM Automation (providing access to ADSI, ADO, WMI, etc)
· User Defined Functions
· Speed: KiXtart is faster than ever before

To begin testing the new features of KiXtart 2001, you can download the
Release Candidate 3 from: http://www.comptrends.com/include/details.asp?n=1&fileid=193. This
version will most likely be the same version that is released once the
Microsoft Legal Dept. lends their blessing to the generosity of its
developer.