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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.
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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