I too, am willing to speak to any group for free, and also speak for free at YAPC and short talks at OSCON.

But no matter how many people want me to speak for free, I still have to make a living at some point. And good courseware is very expensive. We've put about $150K of labor into the current Learning Perl slideset. If I had taught that at "academic" rates rather than "corporate" rates, we'd never have paid it off yet.

You also need to look at the return-on-investment for a company. Taking 30 hours of instruction of one of my courses, the employer spends $1800 to me and about $2500 of burdened cost (if the person makes a $80K/yr salary) for the employee to be in a training.

For that $4300, he'd need to see about one and a half extra weeks of productivity to make up for it. Presuming I make someone about 20% more efficient, that pays for itself within two months or so. It's simple, and justified. At $1800 per student, they're still paying more for the student to be idled than for my instruction, but it's the total expenditure between both that needs to be justified and returned. When you look at it that way, it's actually still pretty cheap.

To someone that's never made more than $20K/year, these numbers may look huge. But to the typical corporate Perl wrangler, these are competitive figures.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
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