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 no charge 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, (an additional 48 hours), due to this downtime. We will simply stop giving out new serial numbers at 23:59 (Midnight) Central Standard Time." Additionally, CodeWeavers updated their site 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 (full builds) of four different CodeWeavers packages became available for immediate download, but only on October 28, 2008. ==References==