Alan Cox Given Lifetime Achievement Award

sebFlyte writes "This year's LinuxWorld awards in London were given out last night, including a lifetime achievement award to sometime maintainer of the Linux kernel and general open-source evangelist Alan Cox. Awards voted for by the user community also went to Ubuntu, for best distro and IBM for best corporate contribution to open source. He also chose to poke fun at the gathered hordes of open source coders saying "I do like all the dot-orgs... They have everything you need in life except soap.""

Comments

What does he do now?

[Anakron]

...was often considered number two...

But not any more? And who's no.2 now? Andrew Morton?

Lifestyles of the rich and famous

[totallygeek]

I know their involvement is not based on what they can expect monetarily, but how much fortune have the major open-source players made from their fame? For example, is Linus a wealthy person, upper middle-class, or destitute (I know this is incorrect). People like Stallman: I have only read that he supports himself from giving lectures and making appearances. It is easy to see where folks that have attached to IPOs have made money and re-invested it to be wealthy, but what about everyone else? Does anyone here have some of that information?

Note that I am just overly curious...

Re:Lifestyles of the rich and famous

[Otter]

There was a period during the Linux IPO boom where every dope with a Freshmeat project or in the bug report databases was scoring insider shares. (Except for poor Bowie J. Poag!) The big guys all made considerable fortunes, at least on paper. See "Woohoo, I'm So Freaking Rich!!!" by Raymond, E.S.

On the other hand, I've seen Stallman in the supermarket a few times and while he can at least pay for food, he certainly doesn't appear to be living too large. I figured he'd go up to the cashier and demand the source code to the cash register firmware, but no...

Re:Lifestyles of the rich and famous

[tomjen]

Stallman has glaimed in some talks/interviews that he lives like a student, and does so to prevent money from controlling his life

Re:Too soon perhaps ?

[Lucractius]

hrm yes hopefuly its not that... but you reminded me of a shoddy little bright red party hat i have lying round somewhere, one of those plastic odd novelty ones covered in gliter, dont know how i wound up with it. but whenever i walk past its steped on and broken self. its hard to not think "Red Hat" then chuckle slightly.

Re:Too soon perhaps ?

[man_of_mr_e]

Indeed, though I wouldn't quite put it that way.

Lifetime achievement awards are given to people towards the END of their lifetime, not in the middle of it. The reason is that people still have a lot to contribute in their lifetime, and giving such an award to someone in the middle basically snubs what they may do afterwards.

And, for the record, giving someone TWO lifetime achievement awards for the same thing is pretty stupid, so any work done after such an award will likely go unrecognized, at least by that organization.

Perhaps a better name for the award would have been "Contribution Award" or something along those lines, that recognizes contributions done to date, without the bad connotations of "lifetime achievement".

Re:The award comes too late

[Billly Gates]

What ever happened to him?

I credit Alan for making the kernel stable during the 2.0 days and earlier. After he left Linux has gone downhill in stability. What is he up too?

I assume he was still in school.

Alan, Linux needs you. Come back