Is there commercial, third-party support for Perl?
Not really. Although perl is included in the GNU distribution, at last check, Cygnus does not offer support for it. However, it’s unclear whether they’ve ever been offered sufficient financial incentive to do so. Feel free to try. On the other hand, you do have comp.lang.perl.misc as a totally gratis support mechanism. As long as you ask “interesting” questions, you’ll probably get plenty of help. 🙂 While some vendors do ship Perl with their platforms, that doesn’t mean they support it on arbitrary other platforms. And in fact, all they’ll probably do is forward any bug reports on to Larry. In practice, this is far better support than you could hope for from nearly any vendor. If you purchase a product from Netlabs (the company Larry works for), you actually can get a support contract that includes Perl. The companies who won’t use something unless they can pay money for it will be left out. Often they’re motivated by wanting someone whom they could sue. If all they want is someone
