I've copied the following from a thread on the Perl board, as it's of more general interest and will give me a chance to put up some background for you.

The following was posted:

"Thanks for your neat and excellent code...by the way, do you charge for this?"

Delighted that you find the code useful, and - no, there's no charge for use of this board!

Let me give you some background.

I'm a trainer - I write and teach course in Perl (and other subjects covered on "opentalk" too).   People who I teach want to ask me questions after the course, but if I'm in front of a class I can't keep breaking for phone calls, and  if I answer by email I seem to keep answering questions for one person that could be of much more general interest.

There is a lack of FRIENDLY places to go to ask questions which are not at the leasding edge of progamming in Perl (or another language).  There are many places you can post, to be told that you "should have looked at page 272 of the Perl Cookbook", which is all very well except (a) you don't have that book (b) how would you know to look there or (c) you don't understand some of the wording on that page.  I hope we're NOT LIKE THAT!!!!

Taking that background, I've given this forum some of our web space.   It was primarily intended for past trainees, but welcomes others who are reasonably polite and reasonably on topic.   At this early stage, I'm working hard to "seed" the forum with good answers, but I am encouraging jfp, almostthere, anji and others to post not only questions but comments / answers too;  I would really Ihope that the proportions of postings that are mine will drop in the next few months.

So - if there's no charge, what's the motive?  To set up a resource and answers that are a place people will look.  To encourage trainees on past courses not to forget me (so much business comes through recommendation) and to encourage newcomers to have a look at my training offerings if they
may be relevant to their needs.  Also to encourage anyone who's thinking of a training course with us to ask past attendees if we're any good   Now ... if that looks 'commercial', yes - to some extent it is. However, I'm in this for the longer term and not looking for instant payback, nor for payback for every question I answer.   It's much more a question of rolling a snowball across a snowy filed, picking up more snow and having it grow bigger.

Oh - and answering and writing is FUN too!

---