CodeWeavers is a company that sells a proprietary version of Wine called CrossOver for running Windowsapplications on macOS and Linux. The company was founded in 1996 as a consultancy, eventually moving entirely over to Wine development and support. The CrossOver version of Wine is regularly refreshed with the latest free Wine patches; likewise, patches from the company are sent back to the Wine project almost immediately. CodeWeavers is a major contributor to the Wine project, a free software / open-source software project that helps Windows applications run on different x86-based operating systems, hosts the project's website, and employs the project's maintainer, Alexandre Julliard, as their CTO. The company originally focused on making the Microsoft Office suite available on Linux. When Apple switched to Intel processors in 2006 CodeWeavers was able to create CrossOver Mac and bring Wine to Mac OS X. Other major supported applications include the financial softwareQuicken and the Steamgame client. CodeWeaver's products include CrossOver Mac and CrossOver Linux. Previous product versions included Pro, Standard, Games, and Server. CrossOver Games was introduced in March 2008 and was intended to allow gaming-related patches from Wine to be incorporated into CrossOver much faster. The CrossOver Pro product line focused on stability and in-depth testing with supported productivity software and had a slower release cycle. In 2012 all versions have had their functionality merged into the primary CrossOver Mac and CrossOver Linux products. CodeWeavers also provides porting and consulting services around Wine and other open-source software projects. Google has paid CodeWeavers to improve support for Adobe Photoshop and add functionality to Wine. CodeWeavers is a founding member of the Desktop Linux Consortium.
Great American Lame Duck Presidential Challenge
In July 2008, CodeWeavers launched the Great American Lame Duck Presidential Challenge to encourage President Bush to make the most of his remaining days in office by accomplishing a major economic or political goal by January 20, 2009. The goals focused on President Bush making specific positive accomplishments in areas such as the economy, home values, the stock market, the war on terror and other key issues. Specifically, one goal called for President Bush to help bring down average gasoline prices in the Twin Cities to $2.79 a gallon. On October 14, gas prices in Minneapolis and St. Paul fell to $2.79 a gallon, and CodeWeavers honored their pledge giving away their software for free on October 28, 2008. Traffic via Slashdot, Digg, and other sources overloaded and brought down the CodeWeavers website as people rushed to get the free-of-charge software. According to CodeWeavers, "You will be able to unlock your serial number that was emailed to you for an extended time,, due to this downtime. We will simply stop giving out new serial numbers at 23:59 Central Standard Time." Additionally, CodeWeavers updated their site @ ~ 9:00 AM CST to reflect the statement: "Please check back again for registration code information later today. We will be deploying a streamlined serial code generation process shortly." At the same time, they also added an "about Wine" paragraph. The streamlined process came to pass, but customers were told to expect to wait "several days" to receive their serial number. In the interim, fully unlocked of four different CodeWeavers packages became available for immediate download, but only on October 28, 2008.
