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Interview with Alan Cox 88

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-to-read dept.
Tekmage hooked us up with an Interview with Alan Cox called "Number two -- with a bullet" that is currently running over at the Ottawa Citizen. Its a nice piece- as always, Alan is super cool. Nice picture of his "Unconventional Appearance" too ;)
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Interview with Alan Cox More

Interview with Alan Cox

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  • Unix hacker (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Doesn't he look like the stereotypical Unix hacker character from the Dilbert series?? (sans glasses, mind you.)

  • Linux hacker (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It never fails to amaze me how insightful Alan Cox really is. He's a brilliant hacker, yes, and he's got mad skills, anyone who's poked around in kernal source can tell you that. But he's also wise enough to know the value that others will find in his work, which is something that most people can't do.

  • Re:Third world - prove me wrong (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    OK wogs - put up or shut up. Anybody from a "Third World"
    country like India, China or Brazil (don't be offended) have a
    realistic assessment of how the computer-using population,
    exclusing hard-core Linux nerds, views Linux?

    Prove me wrong. It seems to me that people in these countries
    who should know better *prefer* pirated Miscosoft products to
    free Linux. The black markets thrive, and governments look
    the other way. (Of course, I'll also assume key officials are
    bribed by MS to ignore the illicit trade. Microsoft likes for their
    software to be pirated overseas because this increases the
    dependence of people everywhere on their products). At
    the same time may of these governments are endorsing
    open source software for use in schools and agencies
    and even requiring it for mission critical applications.
    The governments don't like the insecurity of closed source
    which may allow back doors into high securuty
    areas by the software manufacturers themselves, not hackers.
    (For the same reason closed-source should be banned from
    all US Government contracts, including military systems).
    At the same time these governments (including ours in the
    US) are so corrupt that little of that seems to matter. There
    may be some hope if Linux is used more in the schools,
    but is that happening or not? It will not happen here in America
    first. It must happen elsewhere first (Europe, Asia, etc.).

    This saddens me because I do feel that the portion of the popluations
    in such countries in Asia, South America and Africa who are
    literate are more literate than Americans and and also are
    smarter consumers. Why are they not already using Linux
    instead of pirated Windows, especially considering that Linux
    can run well on older, cheaper machines which people in less
    affluent countries can better afford?

    Time for these countries to "nationalize" their IT industries
    by freeing them from control by a foreign software monopoly.




  • Re:Third world - prove me wrong (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I have read here and there that, just like the Mexican
    government,
    1) The Philipines government endorsed Linux for official use.
    2) The Philipines schools decided that Linux is good for them,
    as well as some big companies.
    3) The Chinese government endorsed Linux for official use.
    I know of many Chinese persons who awoke to this reality. A
    few million a month will follow.
    4) The Korean government endorses Linux. The Korean Microsoft
    officer was replaced due to low productivity.

    I am doing what I can from my end to show to friends and
    relatives that Linux is the way to go. But it is difficult to alter
    a deeply rooted mentality. I can only act by example, without
    pressure.
  • Is it another b0rken firewall their end, or have I tickled an IP masq bug? I can ping the box but not traceroute all the way to it, this looks suspicious. Mind you, my network link seems flaky tonight anyway. OTOH, when I connect to port 80 I get a little data and then a stall, looks like a fragmentation issue to me. *sigh*
  • Bahahaha... I laugh at my own stupidity. Article headline: "Interview with Alan Cox". My stupid brain reads: "Interview with Richard Stallman".

    Go figure.
  • Given that RMS, AC and LT seem to have different ideas about what 'straight' is, 'setting it straight' could cause quite some difficulty :-)
    John

  • Alan... (Score:1)

    by pb ( 1020 )
    Put the shades back on, you look like RMS in that picture. :)

    No, seriously, I'm proud of my beard too, I just have to hack Unix more to get it to look like that.

    However, what's up with the K-DE Windowing System? Eh? That strike anyone else as odd? KDE is common, and 'K DE' is bearable, because it is the 'K Desktop Environment', but where did that dash come from? Journalists, man... Somewhere in the public's respect with lawyers and used-car salesmen. (to paraphrase Barry Saunders)

  • Yeah, Cox is pragmatic. So is Linus, RMS, Walls, etc. Who ever said "Only GPL?" RMS doesn't say that. KDE/Qt is now past a licensing situation which was rightly condemned in the past.

  • Please read more carefully: I said a situation that was condemned. Yeah, there were nuts who condemned Troll and the KDE developers themselves, but we can just ignore those silly people. The bottom line is that it was a situation that was fixed due to pressure from the free software community. Troll was just learning the proper rules of how to play this game. Now, of course, we have things like SuSE with YAST, etc., but hopefully that will be rectified eventually. Notice I have not said "only GPL" (they could use another free software license, of course); I've just pointed to examples of nonfree software contaminating free software.
  • Where's the force coming from? Does someone have a gun to your head?
  • Didn't I see Alan in a ZZ-Top video?

    Kelly

  • I came to the conclusion a long time ago that in the great Linux epic, Linus is like Achilles (blessed of the gods, full of talent, and eminently marketable ...); Alan is Aias (Ajax): a mortal, who in his boundless energy and determination, crushes all obstacles in his path and strikes fear even in gods who would oppose him. (Remember, it was Alan that the BillG tried to turn. :-)
  • They call the season 'fall' here in America, because that's when the leaves fall to the ground and cover it with so many different pretty colors. I suppose it is the other way around on the other side of the equator (so, which way do your toilets flush?)
  • There's a few things that I'm sure Alan Cox wouldn't say but he is quoted as saying here such as Linux was shipped with KDE as its GUI.

    No Linux is shipped with a kernel and then certain distributions then decide what desktop environment + other software they want to ship. Why can't the journalists get that bit right?
    --
  • He looks EXACTLY like the unix hacker from the dilbert cartoon.
  • Uhmmmmm, maybe it's just me. But have any of y'all actually tried to install Windows, since it moved off floppies? Granted, I have installed all the versions that have been released the last couple of years, hundreds of times for work. But I don't have any problems installing Win at all. And even so, I was extremely impressed by the installation of Win2k. I have never seen an OS install so smoothly, and painlessly. And 98 has a very polished install routine too.

    Meanwhile, I have never been able to install a clean, working copy of Linux by myself. Not that's actually booted, and been able to launch X at all. I suppose that not being able to launch a GUI, is not the ideal way to judge the "success" of a Linux install, but it's what I've come to expect from MS OS's.

    Would I love to run Linux, yes. Do I plan on running it at home, yes. Do I like what I have to work with right now, as far as Linux stands, hell no.
  • Here's another little one: killall on linux (which does a VERY different thing on sysV unixen) provides far better feedback than pkill on solaris (2.7). killall will report if no processes were killed, pkill will not. You can check for a process by name by checking for the return status of killall -0 processname. Yes this could be ported to Solaris, but it's an example of the superior command set that comes with most free unixen.

    XF86 manages colors better than openwindows. Openwin is stiiiiiingy, i have an ultra 10 creator w/ 24 bit framebuffer, but just try to put a nice background pic up as your wallpaper. Dithered to hell. Just about anything is better than openwindows mind you.

  • MacOS has the advantage that the same company which controls the OS controls the hardware it runs on. It would be pretty simple for Linux (and, admittedly, Windows) to reliably auto-install on a half-dozen pre-defined hardware configurations. Instead, Linux is faced with billions of potential hardware configurations, with different CPU's, BIOS's, glue logic, disk controllers, video controllers, mice, keyboards, and so on. It's amazing it does as well as it does...

    -Ed
  • The beginning of this interview is a little funny, in how they have trouble accepting the lack of a management structure. This seems to be a theme in many of the acceptance problems with Linux, and other open source projects. There needs to be a better way to explain Open Management ( for the lack of a better term ) to companies with a structure more rigid than my sun 4/330's case ( that's really rigid :) )
    I need my coffee



  • Something I've found amazing about Alan is how he always seems to have half a dozen projects in the air at the same time, and still manages to sleep. I mean, everyone knows he's a kernel hacker - but he does some much other stuff as well. In some ways, I respect him more than Linus - for one thing, Alan has never presented himself as anything more than one hacker among many.

    ObComment on the article: Yet another interviewer shows their general lack of clues and unwillingness to do even the most basic research before conducting an interview...

  • Curiously, this is a different photo of Alan than the one which was printed in the hard copy version of the paper. In that one he was wearing an official looking RedHat red hat.

    /peter
  • What's this, an edited interview! Released in the 'fall'.

    Alan did you really say this?
  • I hvae used Solaris, and yes it does scale better than Linux, but LInux is working on this, and will probably someday scale better than Solaris .. thinks about that...

  • Installing Windows isn't easy, either. The difference is Windows comes pre-installed on most PCs, while Linux doesn't. You need more vendors selling Linux machines.

    agreed.. I have installed win3.1/ 95/ NT.. the most.. most people who I know who installed Linux for the first time had a hard time dealing withthe /dev/hda and /dev/hdb part of the installation (redhat and SuSE distros that is)

    A: Right now, NT is faster at some things, Linux at others. Each have their strengths. The biggest problem with Linux today is it doesn't scale to a large number of processors. We do two processors well, four passably, and eight not at all. The target for the next release, in the fall, is to be much, much better at multiprocessor scaling.

    NT is faster at somethings like 4 CPU's.. but Solaris is still faster than NT.. and Liniux is on its way to being a better UNIX variant than Solaris.. IMHO

    A: Right. There's no central authority making decisions. There's no waiting around for a manager to give the go-ahead on a project. If someone doesn't think something is working right, and he wants it fixed, he just goes ahead and fixes it.

    this is why a problem on my SMP MB has been fixed.. cause someone else had a similar problem and wrote a quick patch when we identified the problem.. now my system seems rock solid...
  • "I am Spartacus!"

    Reminds me of the old story of how a bunch of Wobblies were asked which one of them was their leader. They answered, "We're all leaders!"

    It appears that Linux itself is considered by Linus and Alan to be more important than their respective egos. This is a Good Thing, and it's part of what makes Linux stronger than other projects that serve largely to stoke the egos of their leadership. So far, I've mostly seen this in companies with corporate leader personality cults.
  • You just can't really respect a man who doesn't have a beard...

    ;-)>

  • Re:just curious (Score:3)

    by Mark Gordon ( 14545 ) on Monday July 26, 1999 @05:48AM (#1784393) Homepage
    My understanding is that technically he owns a consulting company ("Building Number Three"), and that his company (i.e. Alan) is being paid by Red Hat to work on the kernel. IMHO, one of the best reasons to shell out for the official versions of Red Hat.
  • nice to finally know exactly who this shadowy "alan cox" figure who is always credited with huge chunks of the linux kernel.

    but what i'm curious about is, exactly where does alan get the money to, like, pay for food and stuff?

    -mcc
    "k-de"? never seen that spelling before.
  • 1 Million! Very cool. Certainly puts the Linux in schools project here in Oregon, USA in to perspective....
  • Funny how tricky a word like "freedom" can be, isn't it? After all, is freedom truely freedom if you try to force your particular brand of it on people?

    Words are tricky. For instance, your remark, "Do these ppl forget that it is about Freedom (not beer)" could be interpreted as an endorsement of Stallman's GPL (instead of the more general meaning which I know is what you really meant.)

    Also, it is interesting to note other examples, such as ESR's side by side idealogies - "I want to live in a world where software doesn't suck - bottom line" vs. "The code must be open for peer review, because, after all, nobody ever built a successful cathedral" *cough*
  • I thought these "What is Linux" articles and interviews were starting to get out of fashion again already... Guess I was wrong.
    The article doesn't really say anything new, does it?
  • Besides there are those who might think the US - read Bill Gates - owns enough souls already. ;/
  • He gets paid by Red Hat, and possibly others, I think.

    If you want to know more about the "shadowy" alan cox, just hop over to his website [linux.org.uk]. Be sure to check out the diary, it's fun.
  • Well, I certainly wouldn't call it "3rd World", but South Korea seems to be adopting Linux (note I don't live there). They recently formed a government committee to evaluate Linux and adopt it to Korean better. So at the least the government is pro-Linux.

    And they're also anti-Microsoft. The head of Microsoft-Korea recently resigned, citing "family concerns". Of course, it's more likely he was just taking a fall. You see, Microsoft recently tried to buy out the company that made the best-selling Korean word processor, but for some reason that fell through (either government regulation or because the company said no). So, to compete, they started offering MS Word for $5 per year! As a result, they've gotten in trouble with the Korean government for dumping. It's not going very well, and that's a more likely reason that the president resigned.

    So this isn't a perfect example. It's not even third-world, but the types of places you are discussing seem general enough to include S. Korea, which seems to be embracing Linux even better than the US or Europe.
  • The photo in the online [ottawacitizen.com] article is the same as the one on page D7 of today's dead-tree Ottawa Citizen [ottawacitizen.com] article - the one accompanying the interview. I think the one you're refering to is on D1.
  • Several posts poke fun at the interviewer's apparent ignorance. I'm convinced that the opposite is true; note how the interviewer seems to "get" Cox's responses pretty quickly. For example, note this exchange:

    Q: What's your title with
    Linux?

    A: Um, it doesn't really work
    that way. We're not organized
    along corporate lines. We
    don't have titles.

    Q: OK. How should one
    reference you in terms of your
    role in the Linux community?

    So we go from the "ssumption that Linux is a single hierarchical entity to the understanding that there is a Linux community that refers to itself as such. This looks a lot more to me like the interviewer know's what's up, but is writing for a target audience of Linux-ignorant readers. As far as I can tell, the Ottawa Citizen is not a technical publication...

    The interview also seemed pretty Linux-friendly to me. (Paraphrasing) "When will you have a GUI? You have one ALREADY?" Surely you've seen infomercials that use this technique. "If only these Ginsu (tm) knives came with a built-in umbrella ... but wait! They do!" I see this throughout the article; the interviewer is asking questions that are the perfect setup to quash some persistent myths about Linux.
  • The conventional wisdom around here is "I like Linux and Solaris, but Solaris is a little more polished."

    This may be true for the kernel and hardware, BUT:
    Question for sysadmins who use both linux and solaris:

    How long can you tolerate Solaris' standard environment before you break down and install GNU replacements for all the garbage in /bin?

    Notice I'm NOT talking about X11Rx vs Openwin or Motif vs dt.

    I'm talking nuts and bolts here.

    # tar czvf . /home/archive/foo.tar.gz
    tar: z: unknown option
    Usage: tar {txruc}[vfbFXhiBelmopw[0-7]] [tapefile] [blocksize] [exclude-file] [-I include-file] files ...
    #

    ARGUH!!!

    # cp -avpu . /home/archive
    /bin/cp: illegal option -- a
    /bin/cp: illegal option -- v
    /bin/cp: illegal option -- u
    Usage: cp [-f] [-i] [-p] f1 f2
    cp [-f] [-i] [-p] f1 ... fn d1
    cp -r|R [-f] [-i] [-p] d1 ... dn-1 dn
    #

    JESUS H FUCKING CHRIST

    For those of you who like to flame GNU/FSF (even if you begrudgingly admit gcc/egcs is just ok), try to sit down at a vanilla Solaris box. Then send me a /bin/sh script that does the same thing as cp -avpu.
  • I don't seem to remember having seen RMS with such a big beard as Alan though.
  • > But have any of y'all actually tried to install Windows, since it moved off floppies?

    Yep. I re-installed mine about a year ago and got into some kind of seemingly pointless aggravation that took hours to fix, and would not have been fixable at all by someone without a technical background. (YMMV)

    Worse, in my experience, is that once you install and configure it like you want it, it doesn't stay that way. If you want to compare ease of installation + configuration you must, IMO, integrate over the life of the system. For Windows I used to be able to do an "easy" clicky configuration repair that sometimes only took minutes (but occasionaly took hours, with multiple reboots), and had to be done for one thing or another almost every time I booted it; for Linux, I spend a good bit longer on the initial config, but only have to do it once per major upgrade.

    And unlike Windows, I've never had Linux boot up under the delusion that my system had grown a new disk drive overnight. Computer-assisted configuration is only nice when it works right.


  • That's it! I was wondering why they described his appearance as "unconventional", but now that you mention it -- he's not wearing glasses! Other than that, he looks pretty darn conventional to me.
  • The journalist shows the usual cluelessness (a)Linux doesn't have a GUI - please! b)Linux is hard to install - no OS is easy to install) and Alan sets him straight. I was also interested to hear Alan's comments about the suits delaying releasing product until the PR guys prepare a spin. Very typical of bureaucrats.

    Overall not a bad article. Though Alan's appearance might scare off a few "corporate sponsors" ;) But who cares......
  • josepha writes: and Linux is on its way to being a better UNIX variant than Solaris.

    For which definition of better is that? One of the strong points of Solaris is that it scales very well. I can develop a product and compile a product on a Sparc 4, and have it run well on a 16, 32 or 64 processor Enterprise server. Scalability to more processors is one of the weak points of Linux.

    You are of course free to have your opinions, but do you have any motivation to offer for those opinions?

    Abigail

  • I've installed the MacOS innumerable times (one of the joys of working on the student helpdesk is being blessed with the grunt work), and I must say that you're simplifying things. Yes, the installer program itself is pretty idiot-free. But this is only because partitioning is done with a seperate utility. And the installer puts in a vanilla installation, with evil unnecessary software (like AOL) and a ton of control panels and extensions for you, the user, to manually enable or disable. It also leaves networking, time zone stuff, special languages, etc., up to the user after installation. So while the install program is pretty easy to use, the install process is just as complex as any other OS.
  • I haven't ever installed MacOS but one of the reasons that linux is "harder to install" than linux is the fact that it gives you many more choices on what you want to install, how you want it installed, and where you want it installed. If all of that was taken away sure it would be easy to just pop in the CD and watch it install. But then what is the point you then have just another OS that is setup in a fixed way. With linux as it is now I don't think of it as harder but that it requires more knowledge. You have to know what you want, then because of the was it is setup you can take those options and have an OS setup just the way you want it.

    Not harder smarter.
  • Oh man, that's funny. When that series of strips came out we were ROTFLOAO because we had a consultant that looked and talked *exactly* like the unix guy in Dilbert. White beard, bald, fat, suspenders.

    "Oh no, you're one of those condescending unix guys!"

    "Here kid, here's a nickel. Go buy yourself a *real* OS"

    This guy was sharp as a tack, no doubt. But he looked the part and had the same attitude as Scott Adam's character!

  • >they have trouble accepting the lack of a management structure.

    Well, that's really the problem that we have around here where I work and it'll just take time to overcome it. They are so used to vendors in suits driving BMW's taking them out to lunch that its really hard for them to adjust to anything else.

    Our PHB's have their well-worn paths when it comes to dealing with IT management. You shake-down the vendors and play them off each other to get the deal you want. You get them to buy you lunch, dinners and golf rounds. You get them on the phone and scream bloody murder when something goes south (even if its not their problem). You get SLA's and hold them to the wall when they don't deliver. This is just the corporate culture that is so ingrained in how these weasels conduct their daily business.

    So Linux/Free Software/Open Source/Call-it-what-you-will is a baffling concept to them. It is going to basically take a generational changing of the guard to get us out of this cycle. The best way I can see to move this along is to give up on the sodgy PHB in charge and work on the heir-apparent so that when he takes over for the PHB when he moves out, we may have a change for the better.

  • > hang around American too long and you start talking like them


    > He start missing the U out of colour


    Is is normal for all you Englishman* to butcher the Queen's English so badly? Or just British ACs? You* start making plurals singular, missing* words out of sentences, and generally screwing up sentence structure next.


    * Yeah, I know. Don't click "reply." Just trying to make a point. I almost left out the asterisks and this disclaimer, but I know someone would've tried to correct me if I hadn't ;)

    --

  • I think he just has a job at a company that involve computers, like most of us. His company
    probably lets him spend some of his time hacking
    around the kernel - after all with an employee like that you should not make him want to leave your company ;-)
  • How can it condem(n?) someone because he/she chooses a licence for the software they wrote?
    You too seem to be one of these guys who know
    it so well, that they start condemning others
    who choose to do it their way. Troll Tech learnend
    that to be accepted by the Open Source Community they had to change their licence - not because they were condemned but because they use their heads to think and want to have success. And about
    your question "who says only GPL". Just look at all the flamebaits who probably never read a licence before and still think that the GPL will save the world or something.

  • Good Pragmatism (Score:5)

    by xnixnix ( 31045 ) on Monday July 26, 1999 @04:51AM (#1784416)
    Now I know why this guy is so successfull. Not ideologies like "Only GPL", "No KDE", "No commercialism" but pragmatism drives this man. He cares about what works, not about how the world should be like or what other ppl should do. In this way he seems alot like Linus Torvalds. To be honest I can not stand those flamers anymore who tell others what distribution, software or licences they should use. Do these ppl forget that it is about Freedom (not beer) and that there is more than one way to do it (right)
    (Thanx Larry!)
  • And don't forget about the diary of Telsa ("The most acurate diary" as she calls it, or "the other side of the story" as he has it linked)...it's hilaryous(sp?) :)

    Vox

  • I'm mexican, and I can only say: One million computers with linux running on them are being deployed in our schools as we speak. I think the project is due mid-2000 or so.

    Vox

  • >XF86 manages colors better than openwindows.

    I thought we were talking about operating systems.
  • I especially like Alan's comment about Linux and the third world. Linux is certainly a good alternative, not only because it's cheap, but also because it runs on old (cheap) software. Of course, this not only applies to the third world, but also the poorer contignent of the first world.

    // Simon
  • I never used MacOS, so please inform me.

    How many Platforms does it run on?

    I thought MacOS only runs on Apple stuff.
    Am I wrong?

    If this is true, then Linux has the more difficult time of installing, because it has to handle different platforms, or if you are only talking about the x86 platform, it has to handle different setups, since different vendors put the machines together differently. This is not an easy task. How many different SCSI drives are there? How about laptops compared to desktops. I never had any problem installing Linux. XFree86 is a completely different matter, and I believe alot will be fixed by the time XFree86 4.0 comes out.
  • I thought these "What is Linux" articles and interviews were starting to get out of fashion again already...
    They are, IMHO. The article doesn't really say anything new, does it?
    Exactly. It's pointless. It simply restates what the Linux community, and the world in general, already knew. But it's not even restating that much. It's just another one of those aren't-we-cool-because-we're-interviewing-someone- big-from-the-Linux-community interviews. The kind of thing that's more to attract people who don't know squat about Linux but have heard the name and want to feel like they're keeping on top of things by reading this interview.
  • I agree that Openwin and CDE are both kind of, well, bad. But if it bothers you so much, then use XF86 on your Sparc. It should port easily, especially with the new Ultra 10's being PCI based you can go and get a new video card that is supported.

    A good portion of Linux stuff works on Solaris, but Solaris has much finer locking, more stability, and frankly more security. It may be quite a while, if SGI doesn't step in, before Linux has as fine locking as Solaris. As for the other two, well... they're moving very quickly.

    Frankly, I don't think that it is a good to compair Linux to Solaris. They are two different classes of OS right now. Solaris is the big time server OS, and Linux is the midrange to low end server and workstation OS. They may compete for the midrange but if a company is willing to spend the money Solaris is probably the better choice in most cases. Personally I think the best set up would be to have a bad ass SPARC server in the background with Linux clients attached to it. The best for the money, security, flexabilty, growth, and power.
  • I don't understand his replies at all.
    I am a bit shady on whether or not X is the GUI, and KDE, etc the window managers, or whether the window managers themselves should be termed GUI, but regardless, there is a hell of a lot more out there than just KDE and GNOME. When he says that 'we' are releasing those with linux, he must be referring to a distribution. In which case, which? Sounds extremely biased to me, unless it was a reporting error (the rest of the interview was unimpressive too..)

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