Hi,
Natrajan's information regarding ILUG Chennai sent a lot of my cells racing. I agree that free support is a good thing. But then what about the people whom we support that work for commercial organizations?
Lets take a hypothetical case: Mr. A works for ABC Corp. who has investments in Linux in terms of development, support and even customers. Now Mr. A is a fresher and doesn't know GNU/Linux much... a Perl based project comes up, and then he runs helter skelter for help.
Mr. Cool is cool with GNU/Linux and yes he knows Perl! Mr. Cool helps Mr. A out with difficulties... and ABC Corp doles the project out... because Mr. A completed it on time.
Mr. A agined... ABC Corp. gained... what did Mr. Cool gain? Now I am not cool with that.
Maybe I won't go with what ILUG Chennai does... but yes maybe we can charge support requests from commerical organisations. (That will help me tolerate those irritating signatures).
Charging will also mean one more thing... people will look carefully at the list archives before winging something in.
Regards,
-ah