Supportosaurus

This link to a 9m Clay Shirky talk showed up in the comments of my last post from the always-connected Allan Doyle.

I really like the anecdote about trying to explain Perl support to C++ programmers. The idea that “support comes from companies, exclusively” seems imported from an earlier time, when the statement was literally true. Before the internet, the only reasonable place to get expert support (or quality software, for that matter) would be a largish company. Folks whose professional expertise was forged during that time seem, except for some freakish exceptions, to find it hard to mentally transition to the new order of things.