OStatic

CodeWeavers, the software vendor whose product line allows users to run Microsoft applications on Linux and Mac operating systems, has announced the one-day Lame Duck Anniversary Sale. In honor of the one-year anniversary of last year's popular free giveaway, new customers and returning customers half off everything in its store, including product renewals.

Billed as a 24-hour non-giveaway, customer have until midnight CST tonight, to make a purchase at a 50% discount. Any purchases made today will also include the upcoming release of CrossOver (code-named Snow Mallard ), along with 2-for-1 support days until its release. That is, if you purchase today, and we ship Snow Mallard a month from now, we'll retroactively add two months of support to your account when Snow Mallard comes out, and you'll get it for free, the CodeWeavers team announced in an email to customers. As an additional incentive to buy today, 25 random customers will receive lifetime support contracts as well.

In typical hilarious fashion, CodeWeavers CEO Jeremy White issued a press release outlining his reasons for not giving away his products for free again this year. His tongue-in-cheek explanation is that the 650,000 licenses he gave away last year nearly sent the company into a financial tailspin and left his sales director a shattered mess. My socialist phase has passed, says White. I?m back to being a greedy capitalist.

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You might recall that several weeks ago Jeremy White, president and CEO of CodeWeavers, promised to had out free licenses for the popular commercial version of Wine if at least one of a handful of (seemingly) unlikely economic goals CodeWeavers set were met before President George. W. Bush left the White House.

Surprisingly, one of those goals has been met. Gas prices have dropped below $2.79 a gallon in the Twin Cities and that means free software for everyone tomorrow at CodeWeavers.

You might recall that several weeks ago Jeremy White, president and CEO of CodeWeavers, promised to had out free licenses for the popular commercial version of Wine if at least one of a handful of (seemingly) unlikely economic goalsCodeWeavers were met before President George. W. Bush left the White House.

Surprisingly, one of those goals has been met. Gas prices have dropped below $2.79 a gallon in the Twin Cities and that means free software for everyone tomorrow at CodeWeavers.

In what may be one of the longest development and testing processes in the history of programming (15 years, actually), Wine 1.0 is now available for free download at the project's Web site. Commonly used to play Windows-only games on computers with a Linux operating system, thousands of other applications and tools also work under Wine, including such notables as Photoshop CS2 and WinRAR.

Seth Godin has some advice to marketeers and businesses that open source proejcts should take to heart as well. Godin writes today about embracing the lifetime value of a customer. Open source projects may not have customers, but it pays to think about the lifetime value of users as well.

Godin writes Instead of comparing what you invest to the benefit you receive from the first bill, the first visit, the first transaction, it's important to not only recognize but embrace the true lifetime value of one more customer.

Even though it's a point release, the latest Amarok comes with some major new features and all the benefits of the 2.2.0 release. Dubbed Weightless, the 2.2.1 release is full of bug fixes and polishing from 2.2.0 release as well as improvements to music management, podcasts, and the ability to update Amarok scripts.

Amarok is already speedy when processing large media collections, but this release includes a tweak to take it up a notch. In the past, Amarok would scan an entire directory -- including sub-folders -- when the main directory had changed. Now Amarok can just breeze through the main directory if the subdirectories haven't been modified, making it even faster. And it's plenty fast already: I've passed a 57GB collection through Amarok in just a few minutes.