I've had some trouble justifying the publication of File::Tail to my boss. He was worried I'd spend too much time supporting the users of the module, and not enough working on company's other projects. I convinced him that other users would mostly send patches that would improve functionality. (Which as it turns out, wasn't exactly true)

I've had much better luck when we needed specific functionality from Proc::ProcessTable. The module's behaviour on Freebsd significantly differed from the behaviour on Solaris/Linux, and we needed it on all three. A collegue wrote a patch, and the boss immediately okayed sending that patch to the maintainer. Naturaly, since otherwise we'd have to apply that patch each time a new version came out. (Not to mention losing the easy CPAN instalation).