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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."
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.
something people in our industry should do more
No in the UK 'family reasons' usually means 'The torrid affair I;ve been having with my secretary has been found out and plastered all over the red tops'. Hence 'I need to spend more time with my family'.
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!
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.'"
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 :-)
The culture encourages it. You hear things like 'being there for the team', 'stepping up to the plate', 'putting in the extra 110% effort'. Then you have those who try to out macho each other with number of hours in a week (knew one guy who liked 110 hour weeks). Or those who actually dislike their family life and want to do as little as possible with it (funny making the problem worse). Then expect others around them to be doing the same thing. The old saying is true misery loves company.
Extra is ok once and awhile. But once it becomes every damn time you start to see the cracks of process that are wrong.
We keep making the same mistakes over and over as a group because we do not bother to learn from the 'old guys'.
If work is your life what happens when they lay you off/fire you/eliminate your position?
For a worldwide known top kernel developer to switch to ubuntu and leave development, Fedora 18 must be obscenely bad.
In his case, it definitely doesn't mean that. Having corresponded with him in the very early days of Linux, I found him to be supremely competent, surprisingly helpful (given his workload), and genuinely pleasant. None of those attributes align with your interpretation of the phrase.
I can't think of anyone who has given more to the Linux community than Mr. Cox - not even Linus, actually - and his departure will be felt immediately, and profoundly.
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..
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
Cox has always been extremely helpful to those contacting him directly. He used to work for NTL (broadband supplier in the UK that gobbled up local smaller outfits until Virgin ate them up), after dealing with support drones you could get put through to the real admins, and I ended up with him once because I was using that strange thing called "leenoox" and the first genuine tech I got knew he was "into that stuff". Chatting away, he grilled me on databases once he learned I worked on AS/400s. A few years later after I jumped ship, he was very helpful with dell server drive controller driver woes.