The "Open Source training" that I provide as my day job started from just three customer requests for a Perl course.

I was using Perl for various web site and internal works, and training under contract - so I suppose I was a natural one to ask.  By I hadn't given a clue to people that I could / would write my own material.  I'm afraid I told the first person that I hadn't seen much call for the course. "Who's going to pay for training on a piece of free software?" I think I asked. The second person got a rather more muted "No - sorry".  After all, it's said to take some ten days of course material development for a single brand new day of presentation. I stopped myself just before saying "I keep telling people - there's no call for that ..." to the third person and the rest, they say, is history.

The train service to date has NOT been well publicised.   The fact that we've had a station in Melksham has, frankly, come to a surprise to many of the residents of the town.  And yet .... compound traffic growth at 35% per annum?   150 people travelling on the 17:50 from Swindon on 10th December when the Melksham Rail Development Group did a bit of publicity.

From my mailbox this morning, I read After using the service again after a break of a couple of years I have been pleasantly suprised to find more people using it than before. It seems perverse to prune the service just when it is starting to bear fruit..  But I also read I cannot argue that the current level of services are retained as I have seen nothing which suggests that there is a strong business case to support this.. Now that strikes me as a comment I could have made when the third person approached me about a Perl course.

What happened to those Perl courses?   They COULD have fizzled out to nothing.  But they haven't - they've turned into a complete and successful business that's growing year on year.