QUOTE(lilburne @ Mon 15th August 2011, 9:34pm)
I had a several similar requests last year. Being as the only contact I'd had with him was via the foundation-l, and he'd made a reply off-list, I gathered that linkedin is harvesting his email and sending out requests.
LinkedIn doesn't just go and "harvest" on its own volition, though. The user-member initiates that scrape of Gmail addresses who are also LinkedIn members; then the user-member has the option of checking or un-checking those prospective recipients, to tailor the invitation list.
I think what happened here is fairly clear (based on other e-mails I've received today from other Godwin-connections-wannabes). Godwin executed the Google e-mail scraping feature, then didn't give a shit which people it came up with, and he just selected "Invite all". What I find interesting is that I extended him a rather polite and generous response, to which he responded like a tough 10th-grader, completely disregarding the fact that HE was the one who polluted MY inbox in the first place.
No wonder he's jobless.