That's the right way, just release the code and give a +&(§ on what you wanted to do first

No, seriously, it would be very nice to have this water shader open-source

PS: What do you mean by directX 8 here? Do you want to know if it works on dx 8 cards or if it works with dx 8 installed (thus without dx9)? If you were wondering about the first point, as I said: works very well on g4ti4200 which actually is a dx8 card