The 2.5 Kernel Tree And Alan Cox

Motor writes "It seems that (as everyone suspected), the 2.5 Linux kernel tree is close to opening. However, contrary to expectations, 2.4 will not be maintained by Alan Cox, but will instead be handled by Marcelo Tosatti. Thanks to Alan for all his hard work on 2.0 and 2.2."

So we can see the changelog, right?

[The Turd Report]

I hope this maintainer will not be as paranoid as Alan with respect to changelogs and the DCMA.

Alan Cox and the DMCA

[PM4RK5]

Is this partially do to his over-zealousness [slashdot.org] and/or fears concerning the DMCA?

It is a sad day, if US laws are scaring off foreign OSS coders.

What about the diversity of the kernel team?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm actually quite concerned that the loss of Alan Cox will shift some of the balance in the kernel team. Alan has really done a great job for many years, and we need all sorts of different types of people doing different things in different ways in order to preserve the diversity that has really added a lot of value.

So, who are we going to get to replace Alan Cox? It seems to me that you're going to need Eric Allman or some type of person like that to fill the same roll as Alan has.

why would someone want to maintain an old kernel?

[Niksie3]

It sounds boring to me... Adding new features should be more engaging then fixing bugs and pleasing users.

Re:Alan Cox hijacked development

[Reality Master 101]

Although this is a troll, I STRONGLY support this post. His political views have no place in a development tree. To all of those who think it's OK because they happen to agree with him on the views, how about if kernel maintainers started putting in comments about their pro-life stance, their pro-Christian religious views, or their pro-gun views (at least ESR his views on the latter separate most of the time).

I don't know about anyone else, but I've lost a considerable amount of respect since he started his DMCA ravings. Anyone is entitled to an opinion, but anyone is NOT entitled to abuse their position to foist opinions where they are not needed and/or not wanted.

Re:Alan Cox hijacked development

[Reality Master 101]

In the *changelog*. Not the code.

Personally, I consider the change log as part of the code.

Was it irrelevant (i.e., was he refusing to put in an OOM-killer because of pro-life views)? No, it was an extrapolation of how the law is currently written and was directly related to the topic at hand (security).

Yes, it was irrelevent. He contrived an absurd scenerio just so he could make a political statement. Put it this way -- why did he do it? Because he was in legitimate danger? No, he did it because he wanted to publicize his political views. A change log is NOT for publicizing your views, no matter what they are.

Alan Cox is doing the right thing

[Anonymous Coward]

AC's has shown great skill in pulling together rapid/major changes. Clearly his help is needed with the 2.5 series more than 2.4. But there is also the part that people don't like to talk openly about which is: how much can other commerical GNU/Linux distributors claim that the offical kernel development is a puppet of Red hat?

While AC has done a great job of judging the priorities of the Linux community as a whole over the priorities of Red hat, there is still the question of how much his employeement at RH effects him. Anotherwords, for example, Ext3/JBD is a kernel modification that Red hat is very much pushing. It now appears in all Red hat v7.2 kernels. Also, the Ext3/JBD modifications have appeared for a while in the AC patches. But if these modification started appearing in the 2.4 kernel, others might question if it is because it is truely ready to be in 2.4 or if Red hat is using their AC position to strong arm submittions. Clearly IBM and SGI would also like to see their file system additions in the vanilla 2.4 kernel series. Having to justify the addition of one over the other shouldn't have to be AC's job.

So, I believe Alan Cox is doing the best technical and *political* choice for the Linux community as a whole. :)

We were suprised as well

[gallir]

Curious we discussed this issue in our LUG web page [bulmalug.net] (in Spanish) three days ago. We were surprised Alan seems not to want the job, and Marcelo Tosatti didn't answer publically.

OTH, Linus continues assuming is Alan the responsible [bulmalug.net] (Spanish too).

Re:Alan Cox hijacked development

[GFD]

While this is a troll a lot of the posters here are missing the point entirely.

Avoiding jail is not being polical!

You may have the opinion that anything Alan does as a kernel developer/maintainer is not affected by the DMCA and will not result in charges from some over zelous DA, but I seriously doubt there are any lawyers out there that would back you up. There have to be quite a few court rulings before anyone will even have a feel for this.

One of the reasons that everyone calls DMCA bad law is it's total lack of boundaries. This makes it unpredictable law, subject to abuse. While you and I may feel that there would be no justification to jail someone because they worked on CD/DVD drivers that someone else could use to run DECSS(?) is no guarantee for Alan or anyone else that someone won't arrest them and see what the courts say.

Avoiding being someone's legal guinea pig is not being political.

Time Off??

[HamNRye]

A tip for the Newbies, this is not the first time... Alan has left the project before, generally around the same time in the development cycle. I think Alan is really into the "Cutting edge" features, and once kernel development slows to the quibbling about minutae, as it has now, I really think it takes alot out of him.

Alan also seems to work on HIS kernel, and then let everybody use it. He never intended to be such a dominant voice, no matter how strong his opinions. I think when good technical discussions between he and Linus get publicized as being interminable rifts (which believe me they are not) he tends to step back, being the less media visible member and wanting to avoid the appearance of a disastrous controversy.

And quite frankly, how many of us work 6 months on our hobby and then take some time off?? I sure do...

Wait until the Kernel gets exciting again, AC'll be back.

~Hammy
nothing4sale.org
WindowsXP was crashing like a monkey driving a Pinto.

Where did linus say this on lkml??

[selmer]

All I've read this far was Linus mentioning handing over the 2.4-tree to Alan, I've never heard Linus talk about handing 2.4-stuff over to other people. Last thing I read was that he said it was up to Alan which VM he'd use for 2.4 after he got it.

Re:Alan Cox hijacked development

[dlippolt]

i totally agree.

my personal feeling is that all the work alan has put in on the kernel project _specifically entitles_ him to highlight some issue _directly relevant_ to continued linux development.

my policy-perspective, assuming a mythical world where linux is a company and i own it, is that political viewpoints should be expressly disallowed in the any part of the source tree, to be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. in this case, his efforts are on-topic and don't qualify so much as an expression company-politics (like backstabbing and jibber jabber) or social-politics (like gun control or christianity) but deal specifically with intellectual-property-politics.

end of story.

as he is one of the helmsman of the linux community i applaud his efforts. that i can run entire companies and isp's, securely, with near 100% uptime without using a single windows server due to his (and the many others) efforts encourages me to listen when he speaks... not jump up and down about gun control.

besides, come on people!!! if you can't get an uncensored copy of the changelog with nothing more than a web/ftp client then you're in the wrong business!

Wow! 2.5...

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

And another packet handler!!!!! You had fun learning a completely new firewall, from 2.0 to 2.2, and again from 2.2. to 2.4? Well, the fun never ends with the linux kernel! That's right, folks, get ready for (cue the drums)... packethole! (cue the 2001 theme music). Also, in a related story, the .plan file for 2.8 includes an even newer and completely different firewall tool, chunkywall. One can only wonder, if they can keep this streak going through the 3.x series.

*Note* I'm not a troll, really. I do love linux, and I'll even admit that iptables is much nicer than ipchains. But please.... let me catch up, for crying out loud. I guess it could be worse, microshit marketdriods could invade, and it would be renamed Kernel 2002. *barf*

Re:Starstruck ;-)

[Anonymous Coward]

I met the previous and current Presidents. You're right ... I'd rather have a pizza with Alan. :-)

Alan tends to make more sense than most politicos.

In a world where wiping out an entire village is called "servicing a target", Alan is a refreshing breath of honesty and intellect.

Hats off to Alan ... I just fired up 2.4.13 a few hours ago and she's a beauty! :-) I don't keep track of politics of any sort (not even in Linux), but without knowing if that is an AC release or not, I know that his fingerprints are all over the code. (As are the fingerprints of a largish group of extrememly talented coders!)

There is still room in this world for integrity and excellence. There is still room for Alan.

Bill C. -- Detroit, MI, USA
Linux a.genesis.com 2.4.13 #1 Fri Nov 2 23:03:37 EDT 2001 i686 unknown

11:03pm up 4:12, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.07, 0.14

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1545296 461208 1084088 0 66020 308944
-/+ buffers/cache: 86244 1459052
Swap: 401584 0 401584
Total: 1946880 461208 1485672

BTW ... this is a desktop machine. It's strong enough to run XP ... but why would I want to?

Re:Will this continue?

[ekrout]

Gone are the times when only unix hackers used new Linux releases.

This means: A kernel officially released as "Release" should be VERY stable. Stable enough for anyone to put it on his most important servers, without a second thought.

Remember the problems the 2.2 series went through.

Maybe a new version tag is needed, additionally to the the odd numbers, and the "pre" and "ac" tags.
Like "ea" for "early adopter". Whatever. Anything above "beta".

The distributions would offer two kernels then: "ea" and "stable as hell".

And "stable as hell" is what "release" should mean.

PS: Potential deficiencies in the NT release versions are not really of interest here. Linux can do better. The people in control of the kernel dont need to care about public company quarter results.

Re:Alan Cox is doing the right thing

[hughk]

RH were pushing a journalling file system, because they needed one urgently for their high-end solutions to be competitive. After that, it was just down to the fight as to which was lowest risk to deploy, again RH look at the support costs.

You can look at ext3 and regard as a hack on ext2, which means a lot less new code to check. XFS and JFS were were tested, but in other people's kernels. Reiser was already there but there were some open issues (which I know ill be resolved, but that again is a lot of code), so I respect AC's decision to use ext3 and RH's support for it.

My issue is not so much with AC's patches but with RH's choice of kernel, even then they had to move versions inside a week. In the end, it is non-trivial to take a new stock kernel and to patch it to a level where it is compatible with the 2.4.9-7 that they currently ship. That is, it isn't currently either a pure AC kernel or one from the main-tree.