Stefan Esser is trying to clear up some confusion in a new post to the PHP Security Blog today about his stand on enabling open_basedir on your PHP installation.

From time to time I get the question why I recommend enabling open_basedir and on the other hand call it a solution flawed by design. This is actually a good question, because the untrained PHP user might get a little bit confused about this and might believe that I change my opinion on a daily basis.

He talks about his reasoning - how it does it's job protecting PHP developers from being able to get to those file, but how it's also flawed with issues due to some 3rd party libraries that have their own problems.