Why pirating CrossOver makes you a turd

 Periodically, we come across links to pirated versions of CrossOver or instructions for how to pirate CrossOver yourself. While we know that all software companies have to combat piracy efforts, this still really bums us out. We are a small open-source software company full of passionate people who take so much pride in our projects and products. Our work is challenging, interesting and rewarding. Dealing with people who steal from us is none of those things.

 We are fully aware of how people are hacking our beloved CrossOver to use it without paying, and there are a couple of paths we could take to thwart their efforts. We could stop offering a free, easily accessible 14 day free trial and/or we could make substantial development changes to target the ways we know people are pirating CrossOver. Neither of those options is particularly desirable to us. We pride ourselves on our fully functional no-hassle, no-obligation trial, because we want to make sure that our users love CrossOver before committing to purchasing it. Making development changes to circumvent pirating would divert development resources away from all of the cool new features we want to implement. Neither of these options are fair to people that buy our product: we want them to be able to confirm that CrossOver is right for them before buying AND we want to continue to offer better and better compatibility with a wide range of Windows applications to our new and existing customers. Our priorities might shift in the future if we suspect piracy is becoming more common, but we really don’t want that to happen.

So what’s a person to do if they want to run Windows applications on macOS, Linux or ChromeOS but they don’t want to pay full price for CrossOver? We run promotions several times throughout the year, including Black Friday deals and after each CrossOver release. You can sign up here to receive notifications for upcoming promotions. Renewals of our CrossOver + product provide you with an additional year of support and upgrades, and those are 50% off if purchased within a year of your previous purchase. There are also plenty of free alternatives to CrossOver! CrossOver is based on the Wine project, which is free to use. And since Wine and CrossOver are both open source, there are many other free products based on Wine and CrossOver’s source code. We welcome folks to take advantage of those alternatives; we only ask that if you decide that CrossOver is the best solution for you, you pay for our team’s efforts.

We appreciate each and every person that has shown support for CrossOver with their purchase of a license. Our small but mighty band of misfits loves our work and wants to keep providing the best product and experience we can.

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