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Alan Cox Given Lifetime Achievement Award

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the great-bearded-one dept.

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.""

24 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. What are you going to do now? by Profane+MuthaFucka · · Score: 4, Funny

    Alan Cox: "I'm going to Disneyland!"

    --
    Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
  2. Congratulations! by parasonic · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Woot! Congratulations! But the real recognition has yet to come.

  3. What does he do now? by Anakron · · Score: 2, Interesting
    ...was often considered number two...
    But not any more? And who's no.2 now? Andrew Morton?
    --
    There are 11 types of people. Those who understand binary, those who don't and those who are sick of this lame joke.
  4. Too soon perhaps ? by moro_666 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    usually lifetime achievement awards are given to people that have "faded" and are old and useless

    is this some offensive hint to alan ?

    anyway, as from my personal experience, he might seem really mean sometimes, but eventually it always turns out that he has good motives to do and say what he does do or say. and did i forget to mention that this dude knows how to code ?

    i hope they aren't "carrying him out of the door with an applause", cause i think we still need him, even if he is under the hat of a big red evil company.

    --

    I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
    1. Re:Too soon perhaps ? by Lucractius · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

      --
      XML - A clever joke would be here if /. didn't mangle tag brackets.
    2. Re:Too soon perhaps ? by dirtydog · · Score: 5, Funny
      usually lifetime achievement awards are given to people that have "faded" and are old and useless
      If that were the case, surely ESR would have gotten his first.
    3. Re:Too soon perhaps ? by man_of_mr_e · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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".

      --
      If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
  5. Lifestyles of the rich and famous by totallygeek · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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...

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    Click here or here.
    1. Re:Lifestyles of the rich and famous by totallygeek · · Score: 2, Funny
      Great. Now thanks to your subject line I'll have that Good Charlotte tune stuck in my head all day. ;)


      At first I was thinking Mr Leech. But, as soon as I typed it in, all I could think of was the song too. At least the Macarena has dropped out of my head...

      --
      Click here or here.
    2. Re:Lifestyles of the rich and famous by Otter · · Score: 3, Interesting
      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...

      --
      What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
    3. Re:Lifestyles of the rich and famous by tomjen · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

      --
      Freedom or George Bush
    4. Re:Lifestyles of the rich and famous by A+Numinous+Cohort · · Score: 2, Informative

      On the other hand, he is a recipient of the MacArthur Award (aka The Genius Grant) and the Takeda Award which means he has a nice chunk of change socked away somewhere.

  6. Re:Who needs SOAP? We've got CORBA!!! by temojen · · Score: 4, Funny

    In fact one of the .orgs does have soap.

  7. Soap and... by GillBates0 · · Score: 4, Funny
    "I do like all the dot-orgs... They have everything you need in life except soap.

    ...women. Let's not forget women.

    --
    An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
    1. Re:Soap and... by farnz · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Generally, the .org booths at a show like LinuxWorld are for charitable organisations (like the FSF or Debian) instead of companies (like Novell or Red Hat). I suspect it's the "unwashed GNU/hippies" joke, just slightly subtler than usual.

      --
      I appear to have a blog. Odd.
  8. The "he" joking in the summary by GauteL · · Score: 4, Informative

    .. is comedian Steve Nallon. The summary makes it look like it is either IBM or Alan Cox cracking the joke about the soap.

  9. OK, I'm having a little trouble here by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 5, Funny

    How does an uber-geek get a "Lifetime Achievement Award", which implies having a life??

    --
    No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
  10. Re:Soap and...(ever? ever?) by gosand · · Score: 4, Funny
    ...women. Let's not forget women.

    Can you forget something which you have never known?

    --

    My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.

  11. I have to do it... by acid_zebra · · Score: 2, Insightful
    I, for one, welcome our big-bearded slightly eccentric geek overlords.

    Congrats Alan!

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    -- No Sig is a Good Sig
  12. Forget them? by Dystopian+Rebel · · Score: 3, Funny

    What do you mean? Geeks are downloading them all the time!

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    Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
  13. dot-org joke? by cerelib · · Score: 2, Funny

    Would somebody please clarify the final joke about dot-org's.

  14. Re:The award comes too late by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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

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    http://saveie6.com/
  15. Re:Soap? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2, Funny

    Nononono! It was a complement! The dot-orgs can't provide soap, because all the soap they had, they use themselves. That's what he meant. Or so I keep telling myself...

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  16. Congratulations to Alan Cox by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Alan Cox deserves MULTIPLE lifetime achevement awards.

    1. For being insturmental in getting linux to run on 68k Macintoshes.
    ( actually, this makes him closer to a saint, but I digress..)

    2. For producing the first 64-bit port of linux.

    3. For maintaining the 64-bit port of linux.

    4. For being outspoken about the quality of the programming for the linux kernel. ( Ah ya, another sainthood type thing...)

    5. For promoting and proveying software at levels of quality far above normal industry standards.

    6. For contributing a large amount of time and energy to the development of the linux kernel.

    So...basically, Alan Cox is a god. Id like to nominate him for a MacArthur Grant.

    Killmofasta