Is there a shortage of big open source thinkers?

That's what Dave Rosenberg wonders. He explains,

I consider writing a blog to generally be easier than what might be considered "traditional" journalism, which I also engage in. But, it's becoming increasingly difficult to find new trusted sources of information for discussion. The huge success of RSS is based on the blogosphere's need for more information, delivered easily, I believe in part because the majority of what's out there is redundant, trite or not well thought out. I am a big supporter of citizen journalism (call it what you want) but I am also a bit of a literary snob and extremely well-informed. It's getting harder and harder to find relevance through the haze.

While I was in Asia I only had intermittent email access and my Treo didn't work (damn you Sprint.) Fortunately I was still able to get my daily dose of news from Freshnews.org and all of the sites I have RSS feeds for in NetNewsWire. Matt and I were IM'ing one night in Bangkok and he asked me where else to look for news and I realized I didn't really know. He and I both had the same list of sources and the list is finite. In the blog world we're either creating original content or pulling from the same pool of sources for commentary. I consider myself lucky not only to be affiliated with InfoWorld, which provides credibility, but to have experience in journalism, editing, and analysis-which in theory should make my stuff readable, if not a little bit interesting.

In terms of open source, the realization I came up with-and Neil McAllister hit on in Open Source Could Use A Face-Lift is that there are not enough people out there thinking about open source (this stands with many other technologies as well) in a big way. Or maybe there are and we just don't know it yet. Partly, it's because to be taken seriously as a big thinker it's hard to be from a vendor. That's why analyst firms are always quoted and magazines always want end-user comments. Maybe we can start a list of open source thinkers in the comments of this post and I will publish a ranking. I'll give you a few to start: Tim O'Reilly, Matt Asay, Marten Mickos, Jonathan Schwartz, Jason Matusow.

In general, we as the technology population are not spending enough time thinking. We make all sorts of excuses: too busy with work, kids, dog, writing code etc. But, what we really need to do is think at the macro level and figure out ways to legitimize the technologies of the future for the rest of the population. It might be open source, virtualization or maybe AJAX (ok, probably not AJAX :>) but if we are not spending at least a few minutes contemplating the tech world we are doing ourselves a disservice.

Actually, I think there are more than a few, starting with the linkbag on the right there. They just get insufficient juice from high-traffic guys like me who do their open source writing in less bloggy locations, such as this one.

So we need to start moving the traffic around a bit. Talk more about The Issues. Foremost among which is what Dave says about vendors up there. Even among open source bloggers (and thinkers! same thing in many cases) there's a tendency to look to Vendors as sources of thinking as well as news and fresh products. Meanwhile, nearly the whole open source movement has been carried by individuals and independent developers and development projects — and deployed by Real People Doing Real Work in resourceful IT operations, usually without much credit and certainly without making much news, even in the blogosphere.

One guy on the latest Geek Cruise told me he really didn't want to talk about the cool and original stuff he was doing with Linux because it was a big unseen competitive advantage in his business. This advantage was so critical to him that he didn't even want me naming the business category. So much for reporting in general terms about an example of X open source stragegy in Y industry.

Anyway, feel free to list other open source thinkers. Help Dan and the rest of us out here.