If I had a dozen votes I'd probably use them all on Jamie Zawinski.
His wicked blend of humor, cynicism, realism and practicality make for some fascinating stories and actually useful advice.
He's worked with tons of interesting stuff - obviously XEmacs, Netscape and Mozilla, but he also wrote a bunch of code for the legendary Lisp Machines early in his career.
You might have to be very persuasive to get an interview though. I think he pretty much hates (1) being famous and (2) the software industry these days!
Reading the list I think there are frequent misuses of the term "invented". I think terms such as implemented, developed, or even created are more accurate. To say someone "invented" Rails is peculiar: there wasn't much about Rails' concept that was revolutionary, what was (perhaps) revolutionary was its implementation. I am perhaps focusing a bit too much on the trees rather than the forest. :)
As jey's comment points out, selecting the programmers is going to be an arbitrary process. For example its clearly in the vogue to dislike Aaron Swartz, but I can't see why we'd want to focus on Robert Morris if you are going to suggest that the Internet Worm was his great accomplishment (its notoriety is largely the result of a mistake in the implementation causing it to propagate too quickly, or at least so the story goes).
In vogue or not, web.py is not that interesting. Useful perhaps, but not interesting.
I think people would rather hear about the "dude in a basement hacking for pure excitement" story of the Internet Worm than other more recent stuff Morris has done. It's just more suitable for this book than modular routers or distributed hash tables.
I lose perspective on what generally passes as interesting sometimes, so good point. Number one on my recent interest list has been writing web analytics software, so you might suggest my opinion is a bit away from the norm. ;)
Clicking on the names leads you to an ghost-town page.
Lack of any hint as to how I can vote for or against these folks leads me to think there's a good chance people I'd like to hear from will be drowned out by others who I've already heard enough from.
Lack of a web-based suggestion box makes me think the site is only going to harvest my email and spam me later.
The premise has potential, but the implementation is lacking.
You could just google them, ask them personally via e-mail. You don't need someone to ask you "who's your favorite coders and tell the author about his works". That's like asking you to do his job :)
How about:
- Fabrice Bellard. wrote QEMU, TinyCC, FFMPEG, and an awesome IOCCC entry
- Miguel de Icaza. wrote GNOME, Mono
- Larry Page, Sergey Brin. wrote a program to DoS attack webservers
- Bram Moolenaar. wrote everyone's favorite text editor
- Richard Stallman. wrote two operating systems, one in Lisp (called 'emacs'), one in C (called 'GNU'). authored the GPL
- Bjarne Stroustrup. created C++
- Robert Morris. created the Internet Worm (aka "Morris Worm")