Their product is based on Wine, which is a pretty decent emulation of the Windows APIs, but it is a bitch to setup properly, so you start looking around for more professional solutions.
CodeWeavers, besides their own contributions to Wine, have the advantage that they test their setup against popular software.
The benefits of this community are awesome btw... is love.
I told my friend shortly thereafter (sorry, should have also submitted it to HN in hindsight), who then looked at the site and product features/comparison and costs(http://www.codeweavers.com/products/differences/), and for the last several hours has been building up a huge repository of serials.
Asking him what he intends to do with all the licenses, he replied "they come with full technical support from the company, so I will ebay each for $1, build up a fantastic ebay profile to market my other products and make $$$".
Most of this is done automatically, from harvesting the serials to automated auction listing and delivery, but none the less it seems extreme to me.
BUT, I guess, that is what being opportunistic and exploiting all the verticals is about. :-/
Long-term results are mixed and (as henning notes) this sort of stunt does not attract the type of customer a business wants (that is, those willing to spend money on quality software).
Bogging down your support staff with a bunch of cheapskates looking for freebies can increase costs while doing squat for revenue, all while seriously cheezing off those of your customers who actually paid for your product.
If you're new and you're desperate, go for it. Otherwise, you might want to consider a different advertising strategy.
1.) He tied it in with the current presidential election
2.) He framed it as a challenge with a lot of chutzah (really, running CodeWeaver is nowhere near as complicated as running the U.S.)
3.) The reason he "lost" has to do with a current event (the economic crisis) that has nothing to do with the original challenge (Bush didn't lower gas prices, the crude market did).
4.) The press release had a funny, irreverent tone.
That seems tailor-made for a viral story. It's not that they were giving things away, it was that they were giving things away and relating them to current events in an offbeat way.
From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CrossOver):
* The difference with regular CrossOver is that CrossOver Games will have a shorter release cycle in order to update faster to the latest work on Wine than with regular CrossOver, which targets stability and reliability.
* Crossover Mac was divided into Standard and Pro versions like Crossover Linux. The standard version includes 6 months of support and upgrades, while the Pro version includes 1 year of support and upgrades and a free copy of Crossover Games.
"Word from CodeWeavers execs is that the free license will be for a download-only flavor of the Pro version (!), including the Games optimized build and the option to share a Windows 'bottle' among multiple users on the same machine."
just get both, their fault for bad UI.
http://www.tuaw.com/2008/10/27/codeweavers-says-cheap-gas-fr...
But, they're free to do what they want with it, and this was not a bad move to at least give back to those who really jumped on the chance.
