Jobs trumps Torvalds in 'popular vote'

In a week of headline grabbing election revelations Apple boss Steve Jobs and Linux guru Linus Torvalds have dominated the silicon.com reader vote on the back of this year's silicon.com Agenda Setters poll.

Although the far lesser known Ashley Highfield, director of new media and technology at the BBC, came top of the silicon.com list judged by a panel of industry experts, the popular reader vote appears to have been ambushed by an anti-Microsoft alliance of open source and Apple fans.

From the moment the latest annual poll struck home with the self-professed geek community, including a link on techie über-site Slashdot, the reader poll was always likely to be a two-horse race between Jobs (2nd in the official poll) and Torvalds (7th).

Jobs topped the poll of 2,500 readers, with 39.8 per cent of the vote, while Torvalds was narrowly edged into second with 38.2 per cent.

While Jobs and Torvalds scooped a staggering 78 per cent of the reader vote the other 48 names on the list had to fight it out for scraps.

Bernard Soriano, technology task force leader for the State of California, came third (4.5 per cent), Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL and another open source pioneer, came fourth (3.5 per cent) and Bill Gates came fifth, some way behind his major rivals with 3.1 per cent of the vote.

Reader top 10	silicon.com top 10
1. Steve Jobs	1. Ashley Highfield
2. Linus Torvalds	2. Steve Jobs
3. Bernard Soriano	3. Niklas Zennström
4. Marten Mickos	4. Tom Ridge
5. Bill Gates	5. David Blunkett
6. Richard Stallman	6. Richard Granger
7. Niklas Zennström	7=. Linus Torvalds
8. Donald Knuth	7=. Bill Gates
9. Jonathan Ive	9. Eric Schmidt
10. Ashley Highfield	10. MarkBenioff