Page 185 of The Public Domain talks about Clay Shirky trying to get AT&T to adopt perl.

As Shirky recounts the story, when AT&T representatives asked “where do you get your support?” Shirky responded, “‘we get our support from a community’ – which to them sounded a bit like ‘we get our Thursdays from a banana.'”

I fought this fight when trying to get a company to switch from SUSE to Ubuntu. We asked the executives when had we ever used support and what exactly did they expect to gain from it. Not much, was the anwser eventually, and being a small company with an excellent VP of engineering, we were swapped over in a couple of months.