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Alan Cox Exits Intel, Linux Development
judgecorp writes "Linux kernel developer Alan Cox has left Intel and Linux development after slamming the Fedora 18 distribution. He made the announcement on Google+ and promised that he had not fallen out with Linus Torvalds, and would finish up all outstanding work."
Also at Live Mint, which calls Cox's resignation notice a "welcome change from the sterility, plain dishonesty of CEO departure statements."
Cox says in that statement that he's leaving "for a bit," and "I may be back at some point in the future - who knows."
Sometimes a man needs to stop coding to take care of his family relationships..
did you forget to take your meds?
I always thought it was management speak for "the board realized I'm incompetent and demanded my resignation." Maybe it has a different interpretation in the UK?
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
great work dude. Take a nap and come back soon
Well, one thing's for sure: He was clearly hoping to avoid wide-spread notice of his move or he would have chosen a different venue.
Alan Cox has done some very amazing things over the years. He deserves a chance to get away from tech for a bit. Hopefully he rests up, spends some time with his family, goes on a couple vacations, etc.
Within some interval, he'll likely be back doing something. It's hard to stay retired for someone that good.
I quit Linux development 10 years ago and I never looked back. You get your life back. Hell perhaps you even *get* a life. Linux can be fun but it can also seriously bad for your health, wealth and fun factor.
...but definitely not at Intel, and probably not at Red Hat.
Went off for a few years to learn Welsh and commune with sheep or something. But he came back then and he'll come back again. You can't keep a hacker (in the old sense of the word) like Cox away from a compiler for long!
Valid question: does this mean we can rewrite DMA-BUF in a way nvidia can use?
Except for writing skills I see?
"it's in a constant state of half-assed/never-finished/abandoned" could as easily qualify commercial software, but you have to visit the kitchen to know it.
it's all a matter of transparency and visibility.
Now, for sure, some people doesn't want to know all the gory details, and just need to have something working. But you can just as easily ignore the different linux contributors, and just use a working distro. The only drawback(and perhaps it is not even one), if this attitude is generalized, is that you remove from the programmers pool those who are there only for ego boosting.
What you said should be modded off topic simply because it's a total non-sequitur. What does Alan Cox leaving open source dev to take care of his family have to do with fracturing OSS? Nobody is forking anything.
Mod this offtopic if you like
You're not offtopic, you're just wrong. I hope you don't get moderated at all.
Every time some individual developer or group of developers gets their panties in a bunch about something they disagree with, they take their ball, go home, and start yet another fork of whatever-the-fuck software.
This is the part where you should have read what you've written, considered the meaning, and then terminated your entire comment. You have successfully included the very reason why OSS is superior to closed-source, and then gone on to come to precisely the wrong conclusion based on the available facts. The truth is that this sort of thing happens all the time in closed-source software, too, except nobody produces another fork. Someone gets upset with their life and quits and the project has to be reorganized. But if the reorganized project is doomed to fail in the closed-source world, then it will simply fail, whereas with open source or free software it may be forked and the fork may be successful. Moreover, this kind of protection works for us whether the problem is someone deciding they don't want to play marbles any more (the marbles aren't theirs, so they can't take them all and go home) or someone pissing in the middle of the marble court; we just take the marbles somewhere else, like we're seeing happen right now with MySQL and MariaDB.
It's not only hopelessly confusing to consumers (just TRY explaining the concept of "distros" to your grandma sometime),
Just use a car analogy. The car companies don't make all the parts that go into the cars, and all the car companies use parts from the same manufacturers.
but it make OSS feel like it's in a constant state of half-assed/never-finished/abandoned, as opposed to commercial software
Uh, how does that contrast with commercial software? It's true that there are commercial software packages which have seen continual development since their inception, but that's true of noncommercial, open source packages like Apache, the Linux kernel, and so on. And frankly, the average user is immune to the influences you describe. They're installing an Ubuntu LTS and they're simply not having the problems you're having because they don't have the needs you have. The battle for control of X.org didn't affect them at all. Most people have at least an nVidia 8xxx series or later, so they can use the current driver. Etc etc. You're attempting to describe a problem which doesn't exist. Have you seen how pissed off people are at Windows 8? Are you aware of how much used hardware is on the market because it's not supported by Windows 7, let alone 8?
I know this is not a popular sentiment on /. (to say the least). But, what the fuck. I've got some extra karma to burn.
If you lose karma it will be because you left a completely illogical comment, describing the strength of OSS as a weakness. The fact is that the closed-source world actually deals with this problem less well than the open source world.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
He is finally going to stop wasting time on Linux and do something important like writing Abermud 6!
> kiss runesword
> get runesword
rampage!!!!111!!11ONE
Think of it as a server OS and you'll find it easier to like.
Ubuntu ruined him sooner than I thought it would.
FTFG+: "I frequently think Linus is an asshole (and therefore very good as kernel dictator) ... I've had great fun working there."
The funny part is, Linus would probably chuckle and agree with that statement. You can tell these two have been working together for a long time because there isn't any malice in what he said. He's being absolutely authentic.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
You know, grandma, Linux distro's are restaurants, where you can eat, but they also share their recipes in cookbooks(if you want): everybody has a bit different choice of the recipes they like, not all of them can be used with all kind of stoves ("Debian" can use most kinds of "stoves": i586, arm, ...) and
but all in all, the food served and the contents of those books is quite similar - as there are only so many recipes in the world.
In some of those restaurants you have to cook the food (or better said make it warm) yourself - e.g. at Gentoo's :-)
But he community there is lovely, and their help you.
The cooks that put together those recipes may not be the best in the world (not all of them are chefs in a restaurant with 5 Michelin stars),
but unlike those chefs, they believe in sharing the recipes.(and this really seems to be the best way, as in such a way the cheap, quite good quality food can get to the masses - see e.g. the current rise of the fastfood chain called Android.) And many of these cooks, give you even the meal for free, or cheaply.
The joy/price ratio is high, though maybe not for everybody.
(there are e.g. "snobs" who still prefer those "Michelin" restaurants. In last years, the one offering apple-only diet, is quite popular, providing visually very nicely served, but quite expensive meals
or there is still that, almost monopoly(with huged Windows), where they serve those very little pieces of food ("micro"), softly boiled :-)
So his so-so work will be left incomplete then?
I always liked his soothing voice on those stargazing programmes on the telly.
If it does then stopping isn't really an option. Though I suspect Alan Cox has got a few pennies saved up by now so I hope he enjoys his time off but I suspect he'll get itchy fingers beforelong and be back in front of some kernel source - at least in an informal manner - before the year is out.
Didn't Alan Cox quit once before after Linus flamed him on the mailing list?
https://lkml.org/lkml/2009/7/28/375
Why and when did he come back?
For a worldwide known top kernel developer to switch to ubuntu and leave development, Fedora 18 must be obscenely bad.
He is !!
I told her "I manage to get all my work done during normal work hours". :-)
So, mere hours after slating F18 and switching to Ubuntu, he's decided to quit Linux development? I mean, it *could* just be a coincidence... but... hmmmmmm, I wonder....
Better than the bus thing.
He can always try for a comeback.
Not even necessary... I use it as a day to day desktop, and I must say I just couldn't work on Windows. MacOS X is cool too, but I miss the free software library Linux has...
Its primary strength is as a server OS. This guy's specific complaints seem to center around desktop usage. If he thought of it purely as a headless server OS he might view it more favorably.
There is a followup post:
I hope slashdot gets better at journalism, because right now they stink almost as bad as us, users. We are either busy building funny replies to trolls or trying to craft an informative post, they the editors keep on posting submitted trolls or historic redirect links filled with ads.
Since its so short, here is TCFP (the complete f' post) as well:
Hivemind harvest in progress..
On the website of a business that Alan seems to run separately from his job at Intel, he had aldready mentionned familly illness. (http://www.ultima-models.co.uk/news.html). I guess this is the "familly reasons".
Alan Cox has already contributed enourmously to Linux but hopefully things will get better for him and his familly, and he'll be able to contribute even further :-)
Lately he has been trying to cover a bit the mess than Intel had done with the Poulsbo hardware (GMA500). As an owner of such a hardware, I'm very grateful for this. So I now wish him and his familly all the best in the hard time.
Yeah...umm...thanks sonny. I'll just buy a computer from Best Buy.
Let me guess - you're an American.
It's "once IN a while".
IN not AND.
A WHILE. TWO words.
You American cretin.
I'll just buy a computer from Best Buy.
Better hurry before they go the way of Blockbuster Video.
and therefore I say 'don't let the door hit your ass on the way out'.
Even though I'm not a Linux user any longer, never knew Alan Cox, and exchanged words with Linus Torvalds only once, and even then electronically, seeing news like this makes me feel nostalgic and wistful.
Once upon a time, Linux was a social movement more than a technical thing. I started using it in 1993 as a young CS student after making inquiries about UNIXes for several hardware platforms, hoping to find a "real" system that I could use at home. Anything practicable was in the thousands of dollars per seat range, prohibitive for an undergrad from a lower-middle-class family.
Over the years I ran Linux on just about everything, from PCs to Sun workstations to Macs (both Intel and PowerPC) and mobile/embedded devices. I worked in software, then I worked in technical documentation, all for Linux companies. I wrote a pile of Linux books that paid my way through grad school. I remember when the term "open source" sparked controversy, and a variety of trademark battles.
Through much of that time, I continued to feel that Linux was a social movement. It wasn't until 2006 or 2007 that I finally started to feel as though it had become something else—just a part of the technological landscape. Linux didn't win, and Linux didn't lose either (the same can be said for open source), but instead became a small part of the big world's normal, everyday life. There were no revolutions in the end.
Figures like Torvalds, Cox, and Stallman were once almost like political figures. Now that I'm middle aged and well outside the Linux and open source spheres, with a career that has taken an entirely different direction from technology entirely, Linux has often seemed like a little universe of idealists and pragmatists hosting a particular vision of society and technology in its ranks.
To see Linux describe himself as more project manager than coder and to see Alan Cox ducking out of the mainstream paints the picture of a generation passing out of the vanguard. Presumably the next generation will find different movements, in different spaces (information freedom, Aaron Swartz, et. al.?), using different means.
It's not new to say that the open source "moment in the sun" is over (or even that the operating system's, or the compiler's, is over), but even so, seeing news like this makes me feel old, and gives me just a bit of the impulse to create a VM and install Fedora in it—just because. Or maybe even something older. Red Hat 5? Caldera OpenLinux 1.3? Slackware 3? I guess for that last one, I'd need a set of a hundred 3.5" floppies and a floppy drive...
but it make OSS feel like it's in a constant state of half-assed/never-finished/abandoned, as opposed to commercial software--where a central leadership maintains control (and controls people's salaries and the IP).
There is a difference between proprietary and OSS there. OSS tends to not have less useful features like eye candy because people author the features they use. Proprietary software, on the other hand, is marketing driven, so it tends to have a pretty GUI for many features that don't actually work.
Just don't burn your intellectual capacity or reading comprehension, both of which are clearly in short supply.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
This is the part where you should have read what you've written, considered the meaning, and then terminated your entire comment. You have successfully included the very reason why OSS is superior to closed-source, and then gone on to come to precisely the wrong conclusion based on the available facts.
Oh please, like constant fracturing and duplication of effort is always a benefit. Branching is one thing but full blown forks start with one issue and the rest of the code start drifting apart too leading to situations where you can have feature X in fork A and feature Y in fork B but not both and it has no connection to issue Z that caused the fork. Or your fork doesn't have the bugfix that other fork fixed and it doesn't even apply cleanly if you can cherry-pick it in git. Most forks don't fail because their solution shows itself to be so superior or inferior, but by who can attract the other developers and keep up the maintenance of everything else. It is far more a game of attrition than most would admit.
Analogy time, say you're 10 people who want to move a big rock. In the cathedral version, the leader supplies a rope and tell everyone to pull in the same direction and the rock moves. In the bazaar version they could all work out their differences and submit to a benevolent dictator in the same way, but 99% of the time they don't so they each fork off and try their own one and two-men solution except for the people who people who decided it wasn't their itch to scratch so they went home and those who didn't want to move the stone because they now assumed the stone was there and so absolutely nothing happens. Or for that matter, OSS developers are like herding cats so what would you rather have, a dog sleigh or a cat sleigh? Of course the downside of the cathedral model is that one person can lead everyone into the abyss.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That's got to be the coolest avatar I've seen in a long, long time....
"...as a reminder to me of why the open source movement is at such a disadvantage and never seems to make any real progress..." Funny, software development is a kind of evolutionary process which causes forks and branches, some proliferate (android) some die. What's your point,if it doesn't make any progress, get rid of all your linux devices close by, that would include settop boxes, media servers, most of the backbone of your internet provider and you wont believe it but also your dish washer. Linux and Opensource is nowadays so abundant, you can't get anything with a system running (house security systems in particular) except you want Windows :-)
"People who are willing to sacrifice essential freedoms for security deserve neither freedom nor security."
B F
>as opposed to commercial software--where a central leadership maintains control
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
--
BMO
worthless as a chocolate teapot.
/. for a news site. Now where can I pick up one of these teapots?
A chocolate teapot would most likely be delicious, not worthless, unless made with a terrible chocolate. You are just trying to use something for which it wasn't designed, like trying to use
Sorry guys, I'm drunk and posting anonymously. I just wanted to tell everyone that I'm a faggot!
--
BMO
That would be "Denny's".
Oh please, like constant fracturing and duplication of effort is always a benefit.
Oh please, like there isn't massive duplication of effort in the closed source world. In fact, there is substantially more, because there is so much less code sharing.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I remember posting bugs and whatnot to LKML 10-15 years ago. Usually the first to reply was AC. I've also gotten a lot of mail for being the guinea-pig on a new architecture that wasn't behaving (chipset APIC wasn't happy with APCI code, so we ran some software to pull out the chipset firmware, saw what it was doing and modified the Linux kernel to be happy with it) --Len Brown (AC's Intel partner in crime) was the guy who provided the fix. I understand about wanting to get away from it. If it is driving you crazy and you need serious down time, then you do. I wish AC well, and respect his decision. He can come back anytime he wants, and if he decides not to, its bad for development (he will be missed) and I know I'm not alone in those wishing him well, and the best in whatever he decides.
Just use a car analogy. The car companies don't make all the parts that go into the cars, and all the car companies use parts from the same manufacturers.
For grandma, I would go with a grocery store. She can go to Safeway, or Albertsons. They will both sell 99% the same product. The store layouts might be a little different, but they both sell all the stuff you need to make dinner.
No, in the cathedral version, the leader decides they don't give a crap about the big rock because it is in your living room, not theirs. So, the leader has everyone pinning ribbons up around his house.
1. Must work for free
2. Must be willing to write tons of extra code to insure you dont break others incorrect code in their applications
3. Must be willing to listen to your egotistical boss act like he doesn't understand rule 1.
Maybe I am not seeing the ocean from the beach here but why the fuck would anyone want to do that sort of work?
s also not mainly marketing driven, its mainly customer driven. Period.
Marketing: efforts to drive customers.
People judge success by MARKET share. Does more customers mean better quality? Eat at McDonald's while watching any of the popular entertainment, like "reality" TV and tell me that the quest for more customers is all about a quality product, not about marketing.
I guess that is the maniacal laugh of a desperate man, perhaps you have only just noticed that virtually no FOSS software has gained any adoption in the consumer market *ever*. The closest ones are those that have commercial backing, like android, and that is because the FOSS world is a mess of half finished, abandoned, developer driven projects that no normal person wants to use. Spastics like you actually believe end users *want* to dick around with tinkering and modifying their software, well newsflash **they dont!** they want something developed *for* end users, which is why end user consumers do not choose free software.
Your plausible sounding rhetoric runs aground in the face of reality. Did you see Apple lose 12% today? Triumph of open over closed, pure and simple. Another one. In a long long string. More coming, heading your way.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
To wit, it's also the cornerstone of capitalism that there's massive duplication of effort and a lot of failed pathways. So, it would seem that obviously some sort of joint, government control of the means of production would be the solution. But, that just consolidates the power and leaves there little recourse for new ideas or new direction. But in open source, the power is always in everyone's hand and everyone is able to launch a fork. But, forks don't span in all directions because of in part capital and in part because there's an obvious advantage in cooperation at times.
In effect, open source is a lot closer to the ideals of capitalism than capitalism ends up being thanks to monopolies/oligarchies and government influence. But, then, you don't see many people bitching about capitalism and its by design constant fracturing and duplication of effort. :/
PS - I'm not bitching about it :) But, then, I'm not blind to it, either.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
Perhaps he was hired by Redhat to help fix their latest community release, but doesn't want anyone to know?
ah the FOSS community, never missing a chance to somehow blame microsoft for all their problems.
You can use MacOS X and install the (pkgsrc) which is very portable. This gives you a ton of the free software library you are talking about.
It's not the most effective way of managing "people", but it IS the most effective way of managing SOME people.
Some people will work harder for perks. Others are just coasting to begin with, and the only thing that may motivate them is a firm foot in the ass. Sometimes even that doesn't work, but often it helps.
A manager that rides "everyone" isn't doing a good job. By the same standard, there's a type for the carrot and a time for the stick (or, a time to be nice and a time to be an asshole). Sometimes you've gotta be an asshole.
Having suffered them in the past, I wouldn't be surprised if AC finally got upset with their dominance by legal muscle, to start with.
Who gives a shit about this narcissist ?