I agree that people like Shannon can cause political uneasyness, but
there are many in FOSS that can do the same.  Heck, Shannon is an
admitted Pink-Liberal-Pacifist.  Politically I'm 180 from him, but he
is brilliant in areas of computing.  He writes his own database
interfaces and drivers in hand coded assembly.  The community area of
BME, called IAM, has over 15,000 users and is a dynamic content
creation system with actives users literally all over the world.  He
had it running smoothly at that level on a P3 850 running Windows and
his hand coded software.  He has other sites of interest including
http://www.priceofhistoys.com/ http://www.undermars.com/ and his blog
(linked to IAM) at http://www.zentastic.com/

Aside from political differences (many people on BME/IAM oppose
some/many of his views) he is the one person I know who HAS done
location and mapping work, on his own, nearly by himself, and gotten
it to work.  That alone is somebody who should be consulted for a
project like this, regardless of his more extreme views.   I forgave
Linus for his fathers Communist sympathies years ago. :)

Jon.

I may be guilty of overestimating the knee jerk potential here.