Red Hat is an interesting scenario:   they immediately took on Linux to the corporate market, sold support-subscriptions at a reasonable cost but (except for a brief complimentary period) never free-of-charge.   They also had a very successful IPO (thank ye!!) and they bankrolled all that cash instead of spending it on riotous living, or so I am told.   (And so did I ... ;-) )

Nevertheless, the core problem for the second-example company definitely is revenue.   And I suspect that a great many (Perl and otherwise) consultancies and support-providers might well be feeling that pinch in a different form.   Having software out there in the market is nothing but a great big sucking sound unless it can be tied, and kept tied, to a dependable revenue stream source.   Red Hat certainly did that from the get-go, and that good plan was in their original pre-IPO strategy document, but they also operate at a fairly big economy of scale and with deep pockets.   I am not sure that even they could have started with one business-proposition and switched to another.