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A year later, CodeWeavers urges free CrossOver users to pay up
On the one hand, the promotion wound up boosting CodeWeaver's customer base by 400% (although I'm certain some people downloaded the application without ever getting around to installing it). On the other hand, a huge number of people who might otherwise have paid for the software over the last 10 months might have decided there wasn't much reason to do so.
Now that the 1 year anniversary of the big promotion is coming up, CodeWeavers is sending out emails to the roughly 650,000 people who downloaded the free software asking them to consider paying for ongoing support. The company is also planning on releasing a new version of the software in December, meaning anyone who pays for support will get the update, while those who let their 1 year subscription expire will have to pay full price for the new version.
Do you need support in order to keep using the software. No. But even if you don't need the updates or customer support, you might want to think about taking pity on a company that wound up giving away a ridiculous amount of software in one day last year at the risk of dramatically decreasing revenue for the next year. Last December, the company explained that sales were down 25% since the October promotion, but I'm not sure what the impact has been since then.
Comments
15
Subscribe to commentsCamAug 28th 2009 6:04PM
Isn't crossover a port of WINE?
Dark MorfordAug 28th 2009 6:05PM
Okay, I can kinda understand using this to play World of Warcraft on Linux (though, it being a Blizzard app, it'd probably run under WINE without any trouble), but why Mac? There's been a native OS X version since the game launched.
Matias KorhonenAug 28th 2009 7:21PM
I'm one of the people who downloaded a free copy, and then realised that the open source PlayOnLinux was better, faster, and easier than CrossOver: http://www.playonlinux.com/en/
Glenn TobeyAug 29th 2009 6:02PM
I saw this and that is exactly what I was going to say!
Gardiner WestboundAug 28th 2009 8:22PM
I downloaded the complementary CodeWeavers Crossover suite but did not install it. I never found a Linux distro that ran well on my computer and that I liked. I abandoned my Linux project.
Some good did come out of it. I found a number of very good open source applications that I now run on Windows, like OpenOffice and Miro.
bill cant fartAug 28th 2009 8:55PM
Uhhh... no.
MarkyB86Aug 28th 2009 11:38PM
F*** Crossover. Selling open source software is Apple's job (OSX)
CamAug 29th 2009 1:31PM
May I direct you to here http://www.opensource.apple.com/
Darwin.
MarkyB86Aug 29th 2009 3:04PM
Thanks but no thanks, apple is still proprietary.
BrianAug 29th 2009 4:37PM
You make no sense, is it open source or proprietary ?
MarkyB86Aug 29th 2009 4:37PM
Apple uses open source software and sells it. But it is to only be installed on their proprietary hardware.
KarlWAug 30th 2009 8:47AM
Yes, because we all know WebKit doesn't run on Windows in Safari or Google Chrome, and that it isn't powering the Android browser or ChromeOS, it isn't basically the OS in webOS, and RIM didn't just buy a company to port it to their OS.
WebKit only runs on Apple hardware. It isn't helping that long list of Apple's competitors.
RaithlinAug 29th 2009 9:54AM
I'm one of the users that downloaded and installed their app, but haven't used it since. I'm now playing with PlayOnLinux, but in truth I'm still dual-booting, while playing around with VirtualBox 3.x. I have no need for CrossOver, but I respect their efforts in the open source space.
JohannesAug 29th 2009 10:04AM
MarkyB86, you don't understand. Codeweavers doesn't sell the software per se, it sells the support. Many companies *need* support.
It's not because geeks & fanboys don't need support, than nobody needs it.
More: Codeweavers is contributing back to WINE, if I don't make mistakes, I think it's one of the biggest contributors.
All the best,
Jo
Jon ParshallAug 31st 2009 12:21PM
Some points of clarification:
1) Yes, our sales were impacted somewhat by the giveaway during Q4 2008. But 2008 still ended up being a record year for us anyway, and 2009 hasn't been bad, either. So, despite the sort of crazy scale of the giveaway, we feel like it was a great success. We had fun with it, and we hope our users did, too. No one needs to view our efforts around year-end upgrades as being some sort of a pity party to help us recover from the effects of the giveaway. That's not at all the case. Rather, we hope that people will extend their support because they found the product useful. If they didn't, that's fine.
2) We actually haven't yet started actively sending emails to all of the folks who downloaded the product for free last year. We've done some test mailings to a few, just trying to figure out what we want to offer in the way of promos when the year expiration date draws closer at the end of October. We'll be getting more serious about that in a few more weeks.
3) Yes, we intend to offer a new version of CrossOver Mac closer to that renewal date that will have some significant value-add to our users.
4) Yes, we are the largest corporate supporter of the Wine Project, and do a great deal of the "heavy lifting" in Wine in terms of tackling some of the really difficult technical problems. The Project's maintainer, Alexandre Julliard, is our CTO. We employ many of the best Wine developers. And everything we do gets put back into free Wine. That's why PlayOnLinux works as well as it does--it's based on the work on Wine we do around games. That's all good; that's how the open-source world works. But when folks give kudos to free Wine (and sometimes at the expense of CodeWeavers)("f*** that, I'll just use free Wine..."), it would be well to remember that a lot of free Wine *is* from CodeWeavers. And you're welcome. ;-)
Cheers,
-jon parshall-
COO
www.codeweavers.com