Poking around your technorati stats is a good way to find other interesting people . Today I found Nick Chalko's blog that way. In fact, I found a post saying that he's started reading my blog regularly, a nice compliment. I plan to return the favor. However, I dispute that Nick wouldn't have found my blog any other way than being linked on someone else's blog. Since Nick is an ASF contributor, he could have gone to the ASF wiki to find out. Of course, the reverse isn't true yet. So for Nick, go add yourself to the wiki. For the rest of you who are looking for what ASF people are doing, go suck up some bandwidth -- there are around 30 blogs up there right now. I see Stefano's is missing too.

With the news of the Mozilla foundation this week, it seems timely that the Harvard Business School has recently posted an article on the role of foundations in open source.

Sam's posting on the LGPL/Java issue referenced a post of his from last year. As I re-read it today (I think I read it last year), it strikes me that this is a very "Eastern" way of leading / getting things done. It reminds me of how my parents deal with me (they grew up in China, while I grew up here). The "Western" way is very direct, sometimes in your face. Or maybe Sam is right and it's something that comes with age.

As I mentioned in my blog last week, I briefly met Dave Winer at OSCON last week. I have to admit being a little nervous about it, because I offended Dave earlier in a thoughtless way. But Dave paid me about the best compliment that he could have: "Oh, yeah, I read your blog all the time". I was so relieved that I forgot to say something that I wanted to say to Dave:

I was a user of the original ThinkTank and More products on the Macintosh. I used them constantly, and I still wish I had one of them. So thank you, Dave, for your pioneering work in outlining.

Meeting folks like Dave, Mitch Kapor, and Andy Hertzfeld at OSCON reminded me that there are lots of folks out the that have made big contributions to computing, and that we in the open source community are standing on their shoulders. One way of thinking about open source is that it lets us stand on the shoulders of others so that we can get taller, instead of just trying to rebuild what others have done before. It never hurt anyone to say thank you, and we could do it more with each other.