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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