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Linux Guru Alan Cox Takes A Year Off
An anonymous reader writes "Linux guru Alan Cox is taking a year off from RedHat and kernel development to get his MBA. For years, Alan Cox has maintained the extremely stable 2.2 Linux kernel, and more or less been Linux creator Linus Torvalds' right hand man. Now it sounds like the 2.2 kernel is up for grabs to someone who is 'good at refusing patches and being ignored'..."
He just got scared off by SCO!!
The 2.2 kernel, which he maintains, is the one that SCO claims is free of supposed IP infringements. It is the 2.4 and later kernels which SCO claims were written mostly by SCO. (Millions of lines vs. a total of 4.4 million lines.)
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Stable versions have even final digits. Odd final digits (2.1, 2.3, 2.5...) indicate 'development' versions.
No, not at all a dumb question. North American MBAs take two years on average.
Europe, on the other hand, offers a bucketload of one-year Master's programmes; it's not limited to just MBA programmes. (I did an MSc in London that was like this.) Generally 'taught' Masters are shorter than the 'research' Masters, the latter of which are considered the priming ground for PhD programmes (in both the UK and the US). Unlike the US, though, nonMBA Masters are considered pretty good in their own right.
Good luck to Cox, though. I'm looking into an MBA myself and it does not look nice. Pointy heads, here I come...
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Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
Sorry, you're thinking of the wrong country. In the UK, it takes 3-4 years for a degree; 1 year for a Masters (MBA); and then the doctorates can yawn on as long as a decade, if you can come up with cunning enough proposals for funding. About the only similarity with the American system is the names, really - and the dry personalities that result from 20-odd years in academia when some folk emerge blinking into the world. :-)
"This is why men never share their feelings; because women always remember." -Just Shoot Me.
The easy part of the question is that Linus has final say.
It's more tricky to say who will take over. Probably a kernel developer who uses 2.2 at work. Quite a few companies still use 2.2 but most kernel developers prefer to use 2.6 or 2.4. Maintaining an older kernel is boring...
Degree != real-world experience. I've got both, as I'm sure do many on slashdot. The two are symbiotic, not the same.
A good MBA programme won't take you without experience. Typical students have worked for 3 to 8 years before applying to B-school.
Oh, and we do get quite a few geeks applying here already for a chance to meet Alan. Most of them have seen the credit to the Swansea University Computer Society in the Linux kernel boot messages.
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What country do you live in anyway? You can get an MBA in America, Canada, China, Japan, Australia, Singapore, Korea, India, Mexico, Spain, France, Britain, Norway, Germany, Russia, South Africa, Chile, Argentina, Israel, Brazil, Panama, and I'm not even searching google to find out more.. If you're over the age of 16, have gone to school, in a country with enough tech to have libraries and internet access, and unless you live in a hut or an adobe somewhere in a bombed out country, you should be able to find out what an MBA is pretty easily..
No, it's more like "H1B holders do more work for the same money", i.e. 80 hour weeks with no complaints, on salary. And that salary will be at the bottom of the relevant scale, every time.
Further, the use of H1B holders is stupid for two unrelated reasons: you're shipping money to overseas economies, and you're training a workforce to compete against you once it returns home (which most do).
Again, using H1B workers and/or outsourcing is moronic in the long run, and is against the best interests of the United States and it's citizens.
Those are the facts, Jack.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait