Update on Alan Cox's Sabbatical 191
seymansey writes "ITWales, a company which resides on the Swansea University Campus has posted an interview with Alan Cox regarding his progress of his MBA. It also mentions his opinions on some legal matters that he shows interest in, as well as his plans for the future, and of course for Linux itself."
Geeks in management? (Score:3, Insightful)
who now (Score:4, Insightful)
Who would you like to see (temporarily) fill cox's position.
Re:Geeks in management? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Geeks in management? (Score:1, Insightful)
The brains of the company should be in the cube farm and the board room.
Re:Geeks in management? (Score:5, Insightful)
My personal opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
psxndc
Who the fuck writes this tripe? (Score:2, Insightful)
First off, he's not a kernel hacker. He's a kernel developer. I'd like to think the changes he makes are well thought out [to the extent possible].
Second, Linux Torvalds is by far not the largest OSS contributor in the world. First off, there are 100s of Kernel developers. Second, what of all the userland and development tools required to build the fucking kernel in the first place? Did those just pop out of the wind?
Sure Linus has contributed a huge gift to the OSS community but it isn't like OSS wouldn't exist without him. For starters, the GNU organization pre-dates Linux by quite a while.
Whoever wrote the article should do some fucking research first and less idol worshiping.
Tom
Re:Who the fuck writes this tripe? (Score:5, Insightful)
Alan's pulled off some gnarly stunts with the 2.2ac series; some definite hackworhty brilliance. Remember, hacker isn't a prejorative, any more than soldier is. I do understand the distinction you're trying to make, but it's pretty likely that Alan would call himself a kernel hacker.
I should point out they weren't talking about lines of code as much as public respect. Who's the lead coders of Samba? I know Tridge and Jeremy, but most don't. How bout Apache? KDE? Even if you can name them, they don't compare to Alan and Linus for not only coding so much themselves, but so successfully managing those hundreds of other kernel developers.
Yes, you need devtools to build a kernel. That doesn't make the kernel unimpressive.
It's very interesting what would have happened had Linux not shown up. I expect BSD would have forked into what Linux became. Had AT&T's lawsuit not slowed things down for years, Linux would not have happened, as BSD would have been far more mature at the appropriate time. How strange is that?
--Dan
Geek-to-Suit Program (Score:5, Insightful)
>> a geek a geek regardless of his/her
>> outside appearances.
The likelyhood of a besuited geek showing his geekiness to a hardcore suit on IRC is a big fat 0.
I am a part-time suit, and we're explicitly taught to act somewhat superficial and semi-moronic because in most settings this IS the most effective long-term way to extract the best out of fellow humans.
In a way, a suit is complementary to a semi-Asperger type, with a focus switched away from the mechanics of things, and into the mechanics of humans. Not surprising that most suits come across as semi-moronic. They are, just not in the same way as geeks.
If you want to "fool" a suit, or at least not to antagonize hir, it's actually quite easy to pretend you're one, and also eventually to become one. Gates did it very effectively for almost 20 years, even if some claim he's a mild Asperger.
The opposite (suit->geek) is nary impossible, as it involves a lot more cerebral hardwiring that has to be developed over the years, preferably from a tender age.
I thoroughly applaud Alan's choice to get an MBA. An MBA'ed second-in-command in the Linux camp can't but help.
Think of this: Who will dare accuse a masterized AC of being a communist, anti-business, anti-western, anti-American, anti-copyright, or a child eater for that matter?
Adopting a radical hair control policy might be a good idea. Steve Jobs did that when it became necessary to attract capital from Republican-leaning sources. But he wasn't that famous at the time.
Re:Geeks in management? (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot -- People magazine for the IT world (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not trying to take anything away from the accomplishments of Alan or anyone else. And there are times where features of people are worthwhile, but only when they've done or said something noteworthy. "Alan Cox went to class today" isn't one of them. "Alan Cox gets a crew cut", however, would be..
Re:Who the fuck writes this tripe? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's just silly. If they had said Linux kernel source illuminati instead, obviously I'd agree. But all of open source? I'm sorry, that just isn't so.
I'm not even sure Linus rates #1 here... RMS has a very beefy claim to this throne too. Certainly, if there's a #1 and a #2, it's these two guys who are duking it out. Not Alan Cox.
Re:Who the fuck writes this tripe? (Score:2, Insightful)
Alan has always been active in the hacking culture. A solid 'developer' is going to be a well conditioned person capable of not only thinking in the box but understanding the box.
A hacker is not afraid to think outside of the box. A good hacker also understands the box. Alan is an excellent hacker.
This is also why he will make a great leader in the biz world if he decides to go that direction.
Re:I do believe Mr Cox reads these comments, (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Geeks in management? (Score:3, Insightful)
A lot of the MBA types I know really have a problem with listening to other people's ideas. Sometimes I think it has been trained out of them and replaced by the "I have an MBA so I'm always right" mentality to make them better prepared to deal with other hyper-assertive management types.
This is fine, and probably a requirement to get anything done at higher levels of managment, but becomes a real problem when the time comes for the MBAs and the Geeks to work together. I have seen quite a few projects embarked upon only to fail due to obvious technical impossibilities, when asking a techie's opinion would have stopped the whole thing before the company blew a couple of million on a dead end project. Unfortunately, it is the technical team that gets fired while the MBA heads for the next "ooh, shiny" project.
it doesn't change a thing (Score:1, Insightful)
I can't believe how superficial you are.
First of all there are many well educated, pro-business, American communists. Getting an MBA doesn't change a thing, unless of course the MBA makes you change your political viewpoint and ideas. And ideas is the keyword here.
I was taught not to judge a person by the color of their skin or their religious beliefs. But if you can't judge a person by their ideas what can (should) you judge them by?