If the final shipping product does not come out until the 23 of this month how do so many people have it already? From the shear number of "help me" posts it is obvious that you aren't develepers. I have been on hotline(there are some good servers, several clean servers that don't offer illegal software and offer tech support to anybody having a problem) and seen it around but did not care to download it. I have a T1 network connection and it probably would have taken about 4 hours to download it, I can only imagine it on a dial up connection.
One last note for those of you who have beta versions and wonder why you need to get the final official version there is one very important reason. If you want to use the "auto update" feature of OS9 you will need a legal copy, apple's not going to let a pirated beta to connect to its servers and update the system.

[wlonh]

some copies got out early, some people DO have the GM of OS 9... there are various stories as to why this happened... but the bottom line is certainly that some people paid for a legitimate copy of OS 9 and are using it, Oct 23rd or not.

[madgreek]

Somehow copies of OS 9 got shipped by Apple too early and I am one of the lucky few. I read that 400 or so of us were shipped OS 9 before the mistake was caught by Apple.