Just do us a favor and don't paste this on any deal sites, or Microsoft will make us turn this off. Only for developers!

There's a very strong hint on the site. If you're a developer you should be able to figure it out easily, if you're not a developer you probably won't know how to "remove the disabled attribute" anyway ;)

All it takes is someone to post a few step by step instructions and anyone could re-enable the button regardless of their skills. Hopefully people won't ruin this offer and do that though.

I'm pleased to see that slickdeals and fatwallet both have threads about this deal, but no one has spoiled the puzzle yet.

Or a Chrome plugin :)

It is easy enough to write a small bookmarklet that anyone can paste into the window to flip off the disabled field. Once that gets into the wild, I can't imagine this offer will last.

Fortunately, it sold out before that became a problem.

Lanthe, how much longer do you intend to keep this running? Because I'm timing out before even hitting the form. Would really love to get this as I've been hoping to get into .NET MVC4 but OEM Win8 pro is quite a lot of money.

EDIT: I got through. Thanks.

The "+ shipping" part amuses me. It seems to sum up the whole "out of touch" reputation that Microsoft has, whether deserved or not. Why wouldn't this just be a download?

Ever tried downloading a USB stick?

Yes, because they're totally charging $25 for a USB stick and throwing in Windows and Parallels for free, and the whole thing would be pointless without the USB stick.

25$ completely goes to charity. But they could have still done it as a download though.

Personally I'd rather download a DMG and put it on a USB I can buy locally. Better than waiting for international post.

Microsoft isn't being stupid here. The puzzle is a hurdle. The donation and (waiting for) shipping are additional hurdles. Hopefully all of these hurdles filter well for the kind of developer Microsoft want to attract.

Does anyone know if this copy will work in VirtualBox on Linux as well?

Edit: nvm, it's all sold out

If you just want a copy for VirtualBox on Linux, you can download a VM from http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools . It's a demo OS license, but good enough for testing.