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.