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The 2.5 Kernel Tree And Alan Cox
Motor writes "It seems that (as everyone suspected), the 2.5 Linux kernel tree is close to opening. However, contrary to expectations, 2.4 will not be maintained by Alan Cox, but will instead be handled by Marcelo Tosatti. Thanks to Alan for all his hard work on 2.0 and 2.2."
Go read the linux-kernel mailing list archives; at least once every couple of months, someone tries to give Linus a 300K patch, and he rejects it. Linus wants *small* patches, which do specific things, or implement one new feature.
Essentially, the only reason NON-platform-specific stuff gets through faster is because it all goes to Alan Cox, who then stuffs them into his own tree (the -ac* patches). When he decides they're stable enough to pass on, he breaks them up into bite-sized pieces for Linus.
Is this partially do to his over-zealousness and/or fears concerning the DMCA?
It is a sad day, if US laws are scaring off foreign OSS coders.
"Personal" agenda? If you call "the rights of all americans and people who interact with americans" personal, the yes, I guess that description fits. However, unless you think *any* use of "power" to further the common good is "conflict of interest" and "abuse of ... position", I hardly think you have a case. I do think you are mistaking someone using their "power" for evil with someone using their power for good.
Basically, get off your high horse and let the man fight the good fight....
Where's the new maintainer's weblog, so we can track how he's doing?
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Linux 2.4, maintenance and succession
Posted 2 Nov 2001 by alan
People will have been wondering about the 2.4 stable kernel progression. Various bizarre rumours in Byte seem to have generated a lot of discussion and rumour. Now that the people concerned are all agreed its time to put the entire roadmap out and make it clear.
Linus will be releasing a 2.4.14 and probably a 2.4.15 finishing off the VM stability work and other rough corners. At that point the 2.5 kernel tree will be opened. There is a lot stuff queued for 2.5. It isn't going to be possible or sensible to throw it all into 2.5.0. One of the tasks is to put changes together in the right order.
Marcelo Tosatti will be the head maintainer over the 2.4 stable kernel tree. This is not the giant change it may seem from the outside. The stable kernel management was and is a group effort. Marcelo and many others have been active in 2.2 and 2.4 stabilisation work. I'll be helping Marcelo with advice when he asks it, and working on feeding him the 2.4 relevant bits of the -ac tree.
I will not be dissappearing from the scene, although I might be a little less visible at times. There are various kernel projects I will be working on as well as spending more time concentrating on Red Hat customer related needs. I'm hopeful that spending more time closer to customers will help provide more insight into where 2.5 needs to be going.
David Weinehall did a great job on 2.0.39 when he took over 2.0 from me.I'm very confident that Marcelo will do a great job on 2.4.
Alan
Although this is a troll, I STRONGLY support this post. His political views have no place in a development tree. To all of those who think it's OK because they happen to agree with him on the views, how about if kernel maintainers started putting in comments about their pro-life stance, their pro-Christian religious views, or their pro-gun views (at least ESR his views on the latter separate most of the time).
I don't know about anyone else, but I've lost a considerable amount of respect since he started his DMCA ravings. Anyone is entitled to an opinion, but anyone is NOT entitled to abuse their position to foist opinions where they are not needed and/or not wanted.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Alan Cox's contribution to the development of Linux has been significant and undeniable, and his opposition to DMCA quite understandable. The problems solely in his decission to combine the two, even though many would agree with his intensions. The means aren't justified by the ends.
All Alan Cox did was to refrain from mentioning something in a changelog because he thought it would be illegal. It's like saying "I won't carry a concealed weapon because it's illegal". It may be your view that it shouldn't be illegal, but that doesn't mean you don't have to follow the law.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
So if I have a personal agenda that all people should be Christians, and I decide to use my position as a kernel maintainer to espouse my views, you have no problem with that? You would have no problem with my putting my opinion in the kernel source code?
There is a proper time and a proper place for these things.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Lets dissect this. Where did his polital views come into play? In the *changelog*. Not the code. Was it irrelevant (i.e., was he refusing to put in an OOM-killer because of pro-life views)? No, it was an extrapolation of how the law is currently written and was directly related to the topic at hand (security). As for his "ravings", iirc that was on the mailing lists and if you don't want people to express their opinions *there*.... Lets just say it ain't gonna happen.
My level of respect for him has gone neither up nor down. I don't see how this was abuse of power any more than Linus saying that clubbing seals is wrong.
- Tux
Your argument is not relevant. Religion or gun laws have very little direct impact upon kernel development (for the most part - we can all make up spurious arguments to try and show otherwise). Copyright law has a direct impact not just on the programmers in the country passing the law but also, in the case of the DMCA, on hackers in other countries.
Whether one agrees or disagees with Cox and his tactics, the poloitics involved are affecting the development of Linux (the OS and the kernel) and other Free Software.
- Derwen
http://fsfeurope.org/
In the *changelog*. Not the code.
Personally, I consider the change log as part of the code.
Was it irrelevant (i.e., was he refusing to put in an OOM-killer because of pro-life views)? No, it was an extrapolation of how the law is currently written and was directly related to the topic at hand (security).
Yes, it was irrelevent. He contrived an absurd scenerio just so he could make a political statement. Put it this way -- why did he do it? Because he was in legitimate danger? No, he did it because he wanted to publicize his political views. A change log is NOT for publicizing your views, no matter what they are.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
AC's has shown great skill in pulling together rapid/major changes. Clearly his help is needed with the 2.5 series more than 2.4. But there is also the part that people don't like to talk openly about which is: how much can other commerical GNU/Linux distributors claim that the offical kernel development is a puppet of Red hat?
:)
While AC has done a great job of judging the priorities of the Linux community as a whole over the priorities of Red hat, there is still the question of how much his employeement at RH effects him. Anotherwords, for example, Ext3/JBD is a kernel modification that Red hat is very much pushing. It now appears in all Red hat v7.2 kernels. Also, the Ext3/JBD modifications have appeared for a while in the AC patches. But if these modification started appearing in the 2.4 kernel, others might question if it is because it is truely ready to be in 2.4 or if Red hat is using their AC position to strong arm submittions. Clearly IBM and SGI would also like to see their file system additions in the vanilla 2.4 kernel series. Having to justify the addition of one over the other shouldn't have to be AC's job.
So, I believe Alan Cox is doing the best technical and *political* choice for the Linux community as a whole.
So Marcelo Tosatti is the new made man ? I thought the books were closed...
-Tony Soprano
Always has. Always will (I hope).
:). He also is a practical man in terms of software use. I.e. He still disputes Linus' edict that binary only kernel modules are alowed but at the same time he didn't force Telsa to switch to Linux right away. (She uses it now).
Most people don't know this but in the weekly kernel traphic he is usualy listed #1 in volume of messages. He also subscibes to and discuses important isues in many other places from slashdot.org to the kde-licensing mailing list.
BTW: Read his diary. That's how I found out that he is a GNU fundamentalist
Speaking of Telsa. Her site "The more accurate diary. Really." should be requird reading for anyone dateing a Linux geek with serius intentions towards that geek.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Fah, Kernel developers should do whatever the heck they want, and we should all be grateful. When you start paying Mr. Cox for his work then perhaps you might be able to gain some leverage over how he expresses his opinions. In the meantime, why should anyone listen to you?
Here's an idea. Why don't you code up something half as nifty as whatever Alan will code up over breakfast tomorrow, release it as Free Software for the world to see, and put in your Changelog that Alan is a wanker. Perhaps the people that use your software will care what you have to say.
As far as I am concerned Free Software is a perfectly good medium for espousing your political views. Especially since if you don't like Alan's views you can still use his excellent software without being subject to them.
OTH, Linus continues assuming is Alan the responsible (Spanish too).
sgis ddo ekil t'nod i
Avoiding jail is not being polical!
You may have the opinion that anything Alan does as a kernel developer/maintainer is not affected by the DMCA and will not result in charges from some over zelous DA, but I seriously doubt there are any lawyers out there that would back you up. There have to be quite a few court rulings before anyone will even have a feel for this.
One of the reasons that everyone calls DMCA bad law is it's total lack of boundaries. This makes it unpredictable law, subject to abuse. While you and I may feel that there would be no justification to jail someone because they worked on CD/DVD drivers that someone else could use to run DECSS(?) is no guarantee for Alan or anyone else that someone won't arrest them and see what the courts say.
Avoiding being someone's legal guinea pig is not being political.
2. In light of his anti-DMCA actions, it would seem that he has no issue with putting Linux up on the firing line to support his politically motivated beliefs. It doesn't matter if you agree with Alan on the DMCA or not, not posting changelog notes like he did was childish and counterproductive to the goal of Linux: world domination through collaboration.
Bollocks. What's "childish" about it? The whole reason the DMCA got onto the lawbooks was because people were too bloody complacent - you should be glad that people who aren't even American citizens are concerned enough about it to put up a fight. It might even convince some Americanos to grow a spine and stand up to irrational, corporate-financed laws like the DMCA.
The ext3 stuff is scheduled for merging soon. The VM is simply more important, and as of 2.4.14pre7 basically works (there are a couple of corner cases left where it fails) - and is much faster than the older Riel VM. That was a concluded experiment anyway
RH doesn't get to decide what I feed to Linus,and Linus wouldn't listen if they did. XFS is 2.5 material certainly. JFS I don't know - Im watching it with great interest.
Alan
The DMCA has nothing to do with this btw - and I think given 6 months the US courts will have given the congress the required slap around the head with a wet herring. Until then it pays to be careful
All uncensored change logs are on
http://www.thefreeworld.net for non US citizens. US citizens take their own chances
Unfortunately, Alan was RIGHT in 'putting that crap in the changelog'. If you don't think so then you do not understand the DMCA. Talk to a lawyer about it. He was right.
Would you rather he break the law?
--jeff
ipv6 is my vpn
... how about if kernel maintainers started putting in comments about their pro-life stance, their pro-Christian religious views, or their pro-gun views ...
In my opinion, his comments were directly applicable to kernel development. Gun control, abortion, and Christian views on the otherhand, seem inapplicable to kernel development.
According to the DMCA, it is illegal to post information about such vulnerabilities, and he took steps necessary to protect himself from prosection under United States federal law should he ever set foot in that country.
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!
You know your a geek when a post by Alan Cox is more exciting to you than say, meeting the President.
Andrew
A tip for the Newbies, this is not the first time... Alan has left the project before, generally around the same time in the development cycle. I think Alan is really into the "Cutting edge" features, and once kernel development slows to the quibbling about minutae, as it has now, I really think it takes alot out of him.
Alan also seems to work on HIS kernel, and then let everybody use it. He never intended to be such a dominant voice, no matter how strong his opinions. I think when good technical discussions between he and Linus get publicized as being interminable rifts (which believe me they are not) he tends to step back, being the less media visible member and wanting to avoid the appearance of a disastrous controversy.
And quite frankly, how many of us work 6 months on our hobby and then take some time off?? I sure do...
Wait until the Kernel gets exciting again, AC'll be back.
~Hammy
nothing4sale.org
WindowsXP was crashing like a monkey driving a Pinto.
Yeah, why is a "to-kill" abortion doctors list different? Because in contrast to such a list, the DMCA *will be* affecting his right to publish open source code (besides, there's an obvious difference in scope).
You assume that he is just having political issues with the DMCA and as a UK citizen, he won't be affected anyway. However, he has strong ties to the US (remember, Red Hat's US-based, and he does work for them) and the Skylarov episode shows that it actually _is_ a possible reason for indictment if you write code that defies some arbitrary rules. This is what the DMCA has been used for.
This is why Alan Cox has all the right in the world, as a kernel maintainer in the global Free Software/Open Source community, to do everything he can to allow him to continue writing code. Fighting the DMCA is not a politically correct thing, it's a necessity for him to keep on working. If it's _also_ what he - coincidentally - believes in, it doesn't change its validity.
Yours Arondylos #8-)
All I've read this far was Linus mentioning handing over the 2.4-tree to Alan, I've never heard Linus talk about handing 2.4-stuff over to other people. Last thing I read was that he said it was up to Alan which VM he'd use for 2.4 after he got it.
The scenerio is only absurd because nobody is likely to prosecute. That doesn't change the fact that he would have been violating the letter of the DMCA. Documenting a security bug is a violation of current U.S. law if that security is used to protect copyrighted material.
So what should Alan do in this situation. Yes, he can ignore the law and chances are he won't be convicted, but the potential penalty is 5 years in prison and $500,000. Is it worth the risk? If you think it's worthwhile then you can find the bug and document it, but don't ask somebody else to do it for you.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
Anyone who's followed Alan Cox for a while would laugh at the notion that Alan could be a Red Hat puppet. The day he has a falling out with Red Hat, he'll instantly get a substantial amount of money from some other company. If anything, Alan's involvement in a company that has to support users makes him a better judge of many things than someone in Linus's more isolated position.
If Red Hat is pushing a particular technical direction for Linux, it's quite likely that the reason for the push is because of the expert opinions of the many kernel hackers that work for them as to which code is mature enough to support.
i totally agree.
my personal feeling is that all the work alan has put in on the kernel project _specifically entitles_ him to highlight some issue _directly relevant_ to continued linux development.
my policy-perspective, assuming a mythical world where linux is a company and i own it, is that political viewpoints should be expressly disallowed in the any part of the source tree, to be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. in this case, his efforts are on-topic and don't qualify so much as an expression company-politics (like backstabbing and jibber jabber) or social-politics (like gun control or christianity) but deal specifically with intellectual-property-politics.
end of story.
as he is one of the helmsman of the linux community i applaud his efforts. that i can run entire companies and isp's, securely, with near 100% uptime without using a single windows server due to his (and the many others) efforts encourages me to listen when he speaks... not jump up and down about gun control.
besides, come on people!!! if you can't get an uncensored copy of the changelog with nothing more than a web/ftp client then you're in the wrong business!
Now that's just silly.
He'd be free to rip out the Andrea VM if he wanted; however, I believe his concern is not about the technical aspects of the new VM but the principles involved in making deep changes to a stable kernel.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
I totally agree with whoever said it first-- the whole changelog crap was stupid and childish. While simply refusing to travel to the US would have been sufficient, he went farther, thereby abusing his position to get his political statement across.
Not travelling to the US would be avoiding jail. Not releasing a changelog because he's scared of the DMCA is 100% political.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
Commitment to the cause? That's certainly something Alan seems to have plenty of.
And there's fun and engagement in most aspects of life, if you are open to it.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
Actually, the slowdown is a stupid locking bug I just haven't gotten around to fixing on the production server.
'Course that won't stop me from suing the perpetrator under the DMCA anyway, once I find out who he is.
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
I'm not so sure that I'd say that the VM has been screwed after the AA VM was introduced. Starting with 2.4.10 it was significantly better than prior versions (which were screwed IMHO). I've got a couple boxes at work running 2.4.12 w/ virtually no swap usage on 256MB Ram. I'm running 2.4.13 at home w/ 384 MB Ram and see only minimal swap usage even while running big, buggy things like "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" :) It seems to be stabilizing nicely in recent kernels and at least from my perspective of a couple minimally loaded servers at work and my desktop box at home, it works rather nicely. YMMV however.
No thanks. I don't smoke anymore.
2.4-AC stands for Alan Cox!!! And all this time I'd thought that it was a 2.4 kernel based on submissions from anonymous cowards...
Yes, Alan Rules! Put Linux realpolitik aside. Alan is an amazing asset to not only the Linux community, but to humanity itself. Alan is a fulcrum, a catalyst. His work benefits millions. This is not hyperbole, but fact.
Alan can do what he wants. And we should be so happy that he does. Anyone who thinks otherwise should take a vacation.
I apologize for riding the coattails of a high-ranking post, but I just had to gush.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
Since you asked, and everyone else will want to know..
Here is some info on our new maintainer..
Marcelo works for Connectiva. He lives with "Rik". He looks like this.
His weblog is here.
His "homepage" area is here
And I gotta say.. impressive to get that level of responsibility at his age..
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
THIS
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
I think Alan did an excelent job maintaining 2.2. Now that he has officially left/declined the role of 2.4 maintainer, the question arrises to what/who is maintaining 2.2 (I am assumming Alan is looking to avoid all kernel maintenance for awhile)? My suspision is that it will soon "lay fallow" but I believe most distributions have not yet made the full leap to 2.4 yet. What I am curious about is how much longer will Alan maintain it? It would be ironic if 2.0.x had a maintainer but 2.2.x had none!
I miss the Karma Whores.
Who would file a complaint to prosecute Mr. Cox under the DMCA? No one. Therefore, Mr. Cox's actions can only be viewed as themselves a troll, an unjustified insult.
Whether or not anyone would file a complaint to prosecute him, he would still be breaking the law, according to the advice he was given. I find it hard to criticise him for not breaking it, and even harder to justify the argument that he should have broken the law to avoid being insulting.
If you don't like the consequences of your laws, then pressure your elected representatives to change them.
why would someone want to maintain an old kernel?
It sounds boring to me... Adding new features should be more engaging then fixing bugs and pleasing users.
Ah, but you are forgetting that more people actually use the stable 2.4 kernel as part of many many distributions. Having the responsibility of maintaining this very important (and mission critical in many cases) kernel is right on par with making the next version. It's just a different kind of responsibility.
----- rL
Read his actual comment (like anyone on /. ever does that anymore). He's not getting out of kernel development, he's just not maintaining the stable series this time around. He says he's gonna be working on other kernel projects - a.k.a., he wants his shot at the fun in the devel tree :-)
The Matrix is going down for reboot now! Stopping reality: OK. The system is halted.
To reiterate what the other reply to this parent said, he is not getting out of development. He is just going to be working under the radar a bit more.
But is this really a bad thing? I mean, don't get me wrong; Alan has been wonderful and instrumental to Linux going where it has gone. But the beauty and power of open source is the diversity of its developers. If Alan maintained all stable trees from now on, the kernel would certainly get incredible attention and development. However, it would be Alan's tree. Again, not that this is a bad thing. Yet, sometimes you need some new blood just to get that spark going again. Just my view on the whole situation.
Kudos to the whole team though. And thanks Alan for the great work. Good luck on the new endeavors.
Haing a look at his picture there I saw a familiar face. I spoke to marcelo at Linux.conf.au - if he's the person I thought of, we had a gand old chat about Connectiva's porting of the APT software installation system to the RPM package manager. He's a good guy and quite approachable - I'm a system administrator, and although I have some coding skills (I know some ionterpreted languages and can read C, but that's about it right now) my experience with Linux is mainly as a user and maintainer rather than a developer. Marcelo (like AC, who I also met that trip) was a pleasant and approachable fellow, and it surprised me how both men were happy to converse with anyone without that occasional sense of elitism and self importance that one can get from...well, packet filtering maintainers :).
If you're not familiar with Marcelo Tosatti and feel that you want to "read up" on him. Here's a good way. Follow the link below and you'll find over a 1000 posts made by him in different linux mailing lists, particularly the kernel list. Marcelo Tosatti in the MARC archives
Of Course, half the /. crowd will now start a campagn for Anonymous Coward for President.
;)
Actually, I think Alan would make a great president
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
IBM is a good example.
No, he would do well, I am sure. I think his skills are very marketable.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
>David Weinehall did a great job on 2.0.39 when
>he took over 2.0 from me.I'm very confident that
>Marcelo will do a great job on 2.4.
I am also very glad that someone from a "third world country" takes this reponsability, that shows that Linux is really an international effort and not only dominated by rich or developed countries. It's very nice to see also that a lot of hacking in Linux is occuring in Brasil, I hope other third world countries will follow. That's why free/open source software is so nice everybody has it's chance, this is another aspect of it.
Your example is flawed. Listing the names of private citizens who you think should be killed is not protected free speech in any civilized part of the world. However, if he were to put something in the changelog to the effect that abortion was bad (or good) without endangering people's lives or abridging their rights, then that would be different. If he were to want to include scriptures from the Koran in every comment, or wax on at length about the rain forest then that would be fine too.
I find it hard to believe that I have to explain this to "Reality Master 101" but people have differences of opinion. I personally disagree with the politics of quite a few well known hackers, but it doesn't keep me from using their software.
You are right, however, when you state that sometimes people let these unrelated political views cloud their judgement when it comes to technical matters. If Alan Cox worked for me, then I would probably ask him to refrain from similar politics in the future. He doesn't work for me, however, nor you. And truth be told he is a bit of an unprofessional freak. All you need to do is see a picture of him to know that :). Better yet, read his online journal some time.
The kernel development group is a meritocracy. If Alan were to start spending more time politicking than hacking, he would almost certainly get to the point where he had a hard time getting his patches included in the kernel source. That isn't likely to be the case any time soon.
If you are easily offended by such things, then there is almost certainly a Free Software group that would offend your sensibilities. One of the mailing lists I read is populated by developers that all have scriptures in their .sig, another has a heaping helping of homosexuals (nice alliteration, huh). Some hackers are gun nuts, some are ultra-liberal, some don't bathe regularly :). All of these people speak their mind, and all of them have opinions that are likely to converge from yours and mine. Some probably are idiots, but if they are they are software idiot savants.
Either way there is nothing we can do about it without limiting their freedom. They don't work for us, and don't have to abide by our rules to stay employed.
people have differences of opinion. I personally disagree with the politics of quite a few well known hackers, but it doesn't keep me from using their software.
Whether I disagree or not with his opinion is not the point (I happen to agree). It's using the source code and his position as a forum based on that contrived crap that he pulled out.
He can advocate anything he wants; I have no problem with it. But he should be a little more professional about where he does it.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
FOLK merges in the -ac stuff, much of the -aa stuff, LOTS of real-time code (RTHAL, RTSCHED, RTNET), scheduler plug-ins, much of SGI's debug code, JFS and XFS, support for compressed & buggy memory, software suspend, the VAX architecture, VME support, PPSCSI, ISCSI, CBM64 device support, support for assorted low-budget network controllers, COMEDI and all sorts of other wonderfully insane stuff.
More significantly, most of the "newer" features in the -ac code were in FOLK first - compressed ISO images, e3fs, PPC64 support, plug-in network protocols, etc.
This is not to say that Alan Cox is slack -- I didn't wait for stability before adding stuff into FOLK. What it =IS= saying is that the FOLK series is one of the most advanced Linux kernels out there. There are not many "custom" kernels out there with nearly the scope. (Although it has to be said that most of them beat FOLK hands-down on reliability.)
IMHO, we have all waited far too long for 2.5.0 to be released, and 2.4.x has proven to be too experimental, due to pressures to finish the 2.3.x development series too soon.
If nobody takes me up on my suggestion on using an existing custom kernel as a "2.5.0-wannabe", then at the very very least, ply Linus with virtual beer until he agrees to ensure that the REAL 2.5.0 is not hampered by being kept in sync with 2.4.x, but is the Dream Kernel.
Look, development is very easy. It's easy, because you can build on something that's there. But you can't so easily build on something that isn't. It's also easier to take components out than add them in.
The only logical conclusion is to stuff 2.5.0 silly, and see what survives.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Well then, I agree with you :). Linux kernel developers should deport themselves with as much dignity and aplomb as possible. You are certainly correct that political opinions, even ones as relevant as this one, can certainly reflect badly on Linux in the eyes of some folks.
On the other hand, I can't help but think that Alan Cox deserves to be able to use the Linux kernel as a soapbox. After all, who knows if it would even exist without his tireless efforts. He almost certainly knew that some people wouldn't appreciate his statement, but apparently it meant enough to him to make it anyhow.
Linux Kernel hackers do what they do for the fun and the fame. An unfortunate side effect of this is that it creates a platform for opinionated, outspoken, "unprofessional" Unix hackers. Being able to speak out about issues like the DMCA and be heard is part of the reason that people hack Free Software. It's also a major difference between working on Linux and working on a commercial operating system. The guys hacking the Windows kernel get paid more than Alan, but hardly anyone knows who they are. Taking away Alan's right to use (and even abuse) his "fame" would make Alan both underpaid and under motivated.
Besides, he was right :). He could have been a little more professional, but apparently it is very important to him.