The demand has to come first, says Finch, and given the general non-existence of open source marketing, that's going to take something of a Kevin Costner-scale miracle.

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These companies are either adding support services to an existing open source project or creating software and using open source as a marketing technique.

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It has since been involved in "a number of massive deals for Linux desktops" and they're even in a "massive deal right now for... multi-thousands of units of a desktop opportunity for Linux, " claims Doug Small, worldwide director of open source and Linux marketing at HP.

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One of attractions of open source to entrepreneurs is the marketing model.

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Many companies marketing software today position themselves as open source.

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At Citrix, a maker of open-source virtualization software, Hutchison was senior vice president of marketing.

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This highly successful introduction, aided by a massive marketing campaign from Verizon, was followed by other smartphone manufacturers using the open source Android software from Google.

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Some now fear Microsoft could play that game after open-source software distributor Novell (nasdaq: NOVL - news - people ) struck a sales and marketing pact with Microsoft last year.

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