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Update on Alan Cox's Sabbatical
seymansey writes "ITWales, a company which resides on the Swansea University Campus has posted an interview with Alan Cox regarding his progress of his MBA. It also mentions his opinions on some legal matters that he shows interest in, as well as his plans for the future, and of course for Linux itself."
The brains of the company should be in the cube farm, not the board room.
I have been pwned because my
Time for a new slashdot poll..
Who would you like to see (temporarily) fill cox's position.
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
Tom--
Alan's pulled off some gnarly stunts with the 2.2ac series; some definite hackworhty brilliance. Remember, hacker isn't a prejorative, any more than soldier is. I do understand the distinction you're trying to make, but it's pretty likely that Alan would call himself a kernel hacker.
I should point out they weren't talking about lines of code as much as public respect. Who's the lead coders of Samba? I know Tridge and Jeremy, but most don't. How bout Apache? KDE? Even if you can name them, they don't compare to Alan and Linus for not only coding so much themselves, but so successfully managing those hundreds of other kernel developers.
Yes, you need devtools to build a kernel. That doesn't make the kernel unimpressive.
It's very interesting what would have happened had Linux not shown up. I expect BSD would have forked into what Linux became. Had AT&T's lawsuit not slowed things down for years, Linux would not have happened, as BSD would have been far more mature at the appropriate time. How strange is that?
--Dan
>> There's a je-ne-sais-quoi that makes
>> a geek a geek regardless of his/her
>> outside appearances.
The likelyhood of a besuited geek showing his geekiness to a hardcore suit on IRC is a big fat 0.
I am a part-time suit, and we're explicitly taught to act somewhat superficial and semi-moronic because in most settings this IS the most effective long-term way to extract the best out of fellow humans.
In a way, a suit is complementary to a semi-Asperger type, with a focus switched away from the mechanics of things, and into the mechanics of humans. Not surprising that most suits come across as semi-moronic. They are, just not in the same way as geeks.
If you want to "fool" a suit, or at least not to antagonize hir, it's actually quite easy to pretend you're one, and also eventually to become one. Gates did it very effectively for almost 20 years, even if some claim he's a mild Asperger.
The opposite (suit->geek) is nary impossible, as it involves a lot more cerebral hardwiring that has to be developed over the years, preferably from a tender age.
I thoroughly applaud Alan's choice to get an MBA. An MBA'ed second-in-command in the Linux camp can't but help.
Think of this: Who will dare accuse a masterized AC of being a communist, anti-business, anti-western, anti-American, anti-copyright, or a child eater for that matter?
Adopting a radical hair control policy might be a good idea. Steve Jobs did that when it became necessary to attract capital from Republican-leaning sources. But he wasn't that famous at the time.
I've always found the People-magazine like fawning over the "stars" of Open Sourcedom alternately nauseating and amusing.
I'm not trying to take anything away from the accomplishments of Alan or anyone else. And there are times where features of people are worthwhile, but only when they've done or said something noteworthy. "Alan Cox went to class today" isn't one of them. "Alan Cox gets a crew cut", however, would be..
I guess those management skills can come in handy when managing a team of OSS developpers...