Because free software is openly published, anyone can see exactly how it works and support it. Many companies are taking advantage of this. It's especially useful to companies that publish collections of free software like Red Hat and Suse. IBM, Novel and others are following.

Red Hat's support site

Suse's support site

Red Hat offers a subscription service for business users. Debian does this for free, but their support is less traditional. Red Hat has now followed that example with Fedora.

There are now plenty of people in Baton Rouge to help you out. Just about every computer consultant in town realizes that free software is the next big thing. The best of them can be found here.