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Alan Cox
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Alan Cox (born 1968) is a computer programmer heavily involved in the development of the Linux kernel since its early days (1991).
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While employed on the campus of University of Wales, Swansea, he installed a very early version of Linux on one of the machines belonging to the university computer society. This was one of the first Linux installations on a busy network, and revealed many bugs in the networking code. Cox fixed many of these bugs, and went on to rewrite much of the networking subsystem. He then became one of the main developers and maintainers of the whole kernel.
He maintained the 2.2 branch, and his own versions of the 2.4 branch (signified by an "ac" in the version, for example 2.4.13-ac1). This branch was very stable and contained bugfixes that went directly into the vendor kernels. He was once commonly regarded as being the "second in command" after Linus Torvalds himself, before reducing his involvement with Linux to study for an MBA.[1] His informative and friendly comments have guided many programmers on the Linux kernel mailing list. Alan is employed by Red Hat and lives in Swansea, Wales with his wife, Telsa Gwynne. Since then he has also been involved in the GNOME and X.Org projects.
He was the main developer of AberMUD, which he wrote whilst a student at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.
Alan Cox is an ardent supporter of programming freedom, and an outspoken opponent of software patents, the DMCA and the CBDTPA. He resigned from a subgroup of Usenix in protest, and said he would not visit the United States for fear of being imprisoned after the arrest of Dmitry Sklyarov for DMCA violations.
In January 2007, he proposed a series of "RMS", or Rights management systems.[2] It is said that he has filed a patent for Digital Rights Management (DRM). Red Hat, Alan's employer, has stated that it will not use patents against free software projects [1], so it is believed that these patents try to prevent future use of DRM technologies [3] (some think that these patents cover a part of the built-in DRM implementation of Vista, so that Vista would infringe these patents in a certain extent [2]).
Cox was the recipient of the Free Software Foundation's 2003 Award for the Advancement of Free Software at the FOSDEM conference in Brussels.
On October 5, 2005, Cox received a lifetime achievement award at the LinuxWorld awards in London.
- ^ Linux: Alan Cox To Take One Year Sabbatical.
- ^ List of Alan Cox patents.
- ^ The technology is named RMS, as Rights Management System, but it also bears the same initials as Richard Stallman's nickname, founder of the Free Software Foundation.
- Alan Cox: The maintainer of production version of the Linux kernel. Ch. 5 of ebook Open Source Pioneers, includes a lot of difficult to find interviews.
- Interview on his biography
- His diary in Welsh
- LWN interviews Alan Cox
- Interview with Alan Cox - January 15, 2002
- LugRadio interview
- Linux Format interview - August 2005
- Cathedrals, Bazaars and the Town Council - 1998-10-13
- Ogg audio recording of a talk in Limerick, Ireland 2006-05-13, and a transcript of an excerpt, about GPLv3
Rick Adams - Eric Allman - Brian Behlendorf - Keith Bostic - Alan Cox - Miguel de Icaza - Theo de Raadt - Jim Gettys - John Gilmore - Jon "maddog" Hall - Jordan Hubbard - Lynne and William Jolitz - Rasmus Lerdorf - Lawrence Lessig - Robert Love - Marshall Kirk McKusick - Eben Moglen - Tim O'Reilly - Keith Packard - Brian Paul - Bruce Perens - Eric S. Raymond - Bob Scheifler - Richard Stallman - Linus Torvalds - Andrew Tridgell - Guido van Rossum - Larry Wall