Is there commercial, 3rd-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.

    On the other hand, you do have comp.lang.perl 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.

    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 to help
    them out with Perl problems, there's always the net.  And if they
    really want to pay someone for that help, well, Tom and Randal are
    always looking for a job. :-)

    If companies want "commercial support" for it badly enough, speak
    up -- something might be able to be arranged.