Ben Ramsey

I subscribe to eWeek. Well, you could hardly call it “subscribing.” They send me the magazine for free, which I think they do for all of their “subscribers.” Nevertheless, I receive a print copy of the magazine each week. Of course, last week was no exception.

I took the April 7th issue out of my mailbox and was going to quickly toss it to the side on my desk, as usually happens these days, but the cover caught my attention with the headline “Top 100 Most Influential People in IT.” This list is put together each year by the editorial staffs of eWEEK, CIO Insight, and Baseline. Naturally, I had to open it to see if any members of the PHP community made the list. The obvious names I was thinking were Rasmus Lerdorf, Andi Gutmans, and Zeev Suraski, the people who brought us the world’s most popular scripting language and who helped bring it to where it is today.

Naturally, the usual suspects top the list: Larry Ellison comes in at #1, Steve Jobs at #2, and Steve Ballmer at #3. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, oddly enough, lag behind, and both appear at #10 on the list. Scanning the list, it’s interesting to note that Linux Torvalds appears at #15, Tim Berners-Lee at #35, Jimmy Wales at #57, and Dave Winer at #96 (with clearly the wrong picture).

However, what I didn’t expect to see was who came in at #60 on the list: the PHP community’s advocate for fixing security vulnerabilities in the PHP core, Stefan Esser. Here’s what eWeek had to say about Stefan:

Esser’s “Month of PHP Bugs” project thoroughly exposed the insecure nature of the widely deployed PHP language and forced a rethink of security in the open-source world.

Congratulations, Stefan, on making the list!

No other member of the PHP community or development team appears on the list.