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I am playing with (not so awesome) Open Source alternatives at the moment, would immedialtely buy 1 for home and several for work if available!

1. Increase revenue for the company and the stock holders.
   
   
2. Obtain dominance in he market for virtual environment
   
   
3. Be able to pay and keep employees (especially developers and sales reps) working hard and happy.

1. The FreeBSD community is very loyal as well, and the first virtual company that hits FreeBSD as a host will probably be revered by the BSD Community.
   
   
2. Remember, the BSD Community is made up of the people that work as administrators for the large companies VMWare is trying to target. Usually they are actually TOP administrators with a lot of clout. So by being in with the FreeBSD community, you are getting in with a lot of other potential business.
   
   
3. Make FreeBSD a supported host would increase sales probably as much as last years advertising because doing so would probably cause as much "buzz" advertising for free as you got with your entire advertising budget last year. This 'buzz' would be occurring amongst the top administrators in the industry. So about that part of barely making money...yeah, now that you see it this way, that simple act could do as much or more than last years advertising did to increase revenue.
   
   
4. Preparing for the future. Lets face it, as open source Operating Systems become easier to use, such as PC-BSD, they are going to eventually take over the market, because no one is going to pay for something they can get for Free. In many ways PC-BSD is better than Windows already though many do not know it yet.
   
   As soon as some Marketing guru realizes this, they would probably drive this feature through development.

And don't forget: Whenever a system admin has an OS choice - he or she will sooner or later come to FreeBSD. Isn't that the perfect target audience ?