He just got scared off by SCO!!

The 2.2 kernel, which he maintains, is the one that SCO claims is free of supposed IP infringements. It is the 2.4 and later kernels which SCO claims were written mostly by SCO. (Millions of lines vs. a total of 4.4 million lines.)

Basically no new features will be added to 2.2 but if there is a security vulnerabilty then a new version would be released (the version number would be 2.2.x where x is 1 more than the current revision, that's why there's a third part to the version number!)

Patches can land on the current stable branch too (2.4.x) but normally only to fix bugs or add things that are very low risk.

As you surmised most new development happens in the latest version 2.5.x which is currently in the process of becoming the next stable branch: 2.6.x

Sorry if I'm spelling it out too much :)

Slightly off-topic, but how come all of the Linux kernels are even numbers (as in 2.2, 2.4 and soon 2.6)? I've never seen an odd digit at the end.

Stable versions have even final digits. Odd final digits (2.1, 2.3, 2.5...) indicate 'development' versions.

It typically takes two years full time and that includes a summer internship. That is with 15 credits a semester. Alan is a smart guy and he might try to scrunch that together more. It depends on where he is getting the degree, of coures. The 3 plus years you are thinking about are executive or part-time MBA's that only have two classes per semester.

No, not at all a dumb question. North American MBAs take two years on average.

Europe, on the other hand, offers a bucketload of one-year Master's programmes; it's not limited to just MBA programmes. (I did an MSc in London that was like this.) Generally 'taught' Masters are shorter than the 'research' Masters, the latter of which are considered the priming ground for PhD programmes (in both the UK and the US). Unlike the US, though, nonMBA Masters are considered pretty good in their own right.

Good luck to Cox, though. I'm looking into an MBA myself and it does not look nice. Pointy heads, here I come...

Sorry, bad joke. Ahem...

Dear Alan,

Thanks for the good work. We owe you one.

Sincerely,
Geeks of the World

Sorry, you're thinking of the wrong country. In the UK, it takes 3-4 years for a degree; 1 year for a Masters (MBA); and then the doctorates can yawn on as long as a decade, if you can come up with cunning enough proposals for funding. About the only similarity with the American system is the names, really - and the dry personalities that result from 20-odd years in academia when some folk emerge blinking into the world. :-)

The easy part of the question is that Linus has final say.

It's more tricky to say who will take over. Probably a kernel developer who uses 2.2 at work. Quite a few companies still use 2.2 but most kernel developers prefer to use 2.6 or 2.4. Maintaining an older kernel is boring...

I'm pretty sure, it's Linus that appoints people. After all, it's HIS kernel. If people don't like that, they're more than welcome to fork.

As far as the process getting involved? Start hacking away, submit patches, maybe eventually you'll get bitkeeper access and Linus will start trusting you and your judgement. You'll fall into you're own little role hacking away on the kernel, adding cool stuff, fixing bugs, etc.. Those are the people that are chosen for stable kernel maintenance.

Masters of Business Administration -- Masters degree in the science of running a business -- used mainly for boss types

Degree != real-world experience. I've got both, as I'm sure do many on slashdot. The two are symbiotic, not the same.

A good MBA programme won't take you without experience. Typical students have worked for 3 to 8 years before applying to B-school.

I would assume that he's going go back to the University of Wales, Swansea [swan.ac.uk] since that's where he got his first degree, and he still lives in Swansea.

Oh, and we do get quite a few geeks applying here already for a chance to meet Alan. Most of them have seen the credit to the Swansea University Computer Society [sucs.org] in the Linux kernel boot messages.

What country do you live in anyway? You can get an MBA in America, Canada, China, Japan, Australia, Singapore, Korea, India, Mexico, Spain, France, Britain, Norway, Germany, Russia, South Africa, Chile, Argentina, Israel, Brazil, Panama, and I'm not even searching google to find out more.. If you're over the age of 16, have gone to school, in a country with enough tech to have libraries and internet access, and unless you live in a hut or an adobe somewhere in a bombed out country, you should be able to find out what an MBA is pretty easily..

When driving to Wales you are only likely to see this on a sign once during your holiday, so its not hard to miss. Google does throw up some instances of Croeso i Cymru, but less of them and at a casual glance they are english language sites.

The BBC [bbc.co.uk] come to my recue and put it more eloquently than I did.

...I wonder if you've noticed when driving into Wales from England that Cymru - (Wales) is written with a G on the sign Croeso i Gymru - (Welcome to Wales). This is because the word i - (to) as well as the word o - (from) trigger the soft mutation - and a C softens to a G. Croeso i Gymru.

Tom.

And a few less people who've swallowed the "H1B holders do the same work for much less" bullshit.

No, it's more like "H1B holders do more work for the same money", i.e. 80 hour weeks with no complaints, on salary. And that salary will be at the bottom of the relevant scale, every time.

Further, the use of H1B holders is stupid for two unrelated reasons: you're shipping money to overseas economies, and you're training a workforce to compete against you once it returns home (which most do).

Again, using H1B workers and/or outsourcing is moronic in the long run, and is against the best interests of the United States and it's citizens.

Those are the facts, Jack.

LaTeX and friends do not even come close.

When crafting a large textbook, for example, LaTeX really does blow the pants off of Word. It allows a very clear structure to be employed through includes and a structured tagging scheme. It allows EPS graphics from charting applications to be imported. There is long-standing support for indexing and bibliographies. LaTeX can also be managed by version control software, such as CVS, and can be controlled by Makefiles for well-defined and repeatable configuration management. LaTeX's open nature also guarantees that work poured into the textbook won't get lost as the proprietary Word file formats mutate or when Microsoft drops off the face of the planet.

MS Word is just a bad bet for large documents.

Daily memos are better as plain text. Data-entry forms are done better in HTML. For everything else...well, there is StarOffice or OpenOffice.org or AbiWord, etc. Quite honestly, there is little reason, anymore, to give Microsoft any money for Word any longer.