Linus Torvalds invented Linux. And for the past 21 years, he has served as the project’s (semi-)benevolent dictator. But he doesn’t run the thing by himself. He oversees a thriving community of open source software developers, and for much of those 21 years, a coder named Alan Cox has served as a kind of right-hand man.
Along with Greg Kroah-Hartman, Cox is only a step below Torvalds in terms of importance to the Linux community — or at least he was. On Thursday, with a post to Google Plus, Cox announced that he was leaving both the Linux project and Intel, the chip giant that paid him to work on the project.
“I’m leaving the Linux world and Intel for a bit for family reasons,” he wrote. “I’m aware that ‘family reasons’ is usually management speak for ‘I think the boss is an asshole’ but I’d like to assure everyone that while I frequently think Linus is an asshole (and therefore very good as kernel dictator) I am departing quite genuinely for family reasons and not because I’ve fallen out with Linus or Intel or anyone else. Far from it I’ve had great fun working there.”
Cox also made it clear that — contrary to speculation on Slashdot — he is not quitting Linux because of the wrote on Google+. And he added that he “may be back at some point in the future.”
We believe him. After all, this isn’t the first time he quit the Linux project.
In 2003, he took a year long sabbatical from Linux kernel maintenance — and just job at Red Hat — to study for his MBA degree. He returned, as promised, and continued working for Red Hat until 2008, when he announced his move to Intel.
But then, in 2009, he gave up is role as maintainer of the TTY subsystem of the Linux Kernel after an argument with Linus over a bug. Despite this very public spat, he continued working on the Linux kernel. After all, he’s used to dealing with Torvalds. In 1999 he said to Wired Enterprise writer Robert McMillan, then writing for Linux Magazine, about Torvalds: “Some of the time he drives me up the wall, but most of the time he’s right, which is even more infuriating. A large part of Linus’s job is to say ‘no’ to things. And that can be quite a hard job.”
In July 2012 he told Linux.com that his duties included reworking the terminal layer, trying to get 2D based graphics support from various devices shipped by Intel, and, as ever, squashing kernel bugs.
It was the bugs that brought Cox into the Linux team in the first place. “Having discovered Linux ‘just worked,’ I soon discovered it didn’t quite work and ended up working on various fixes, then the networking stack,” he told Linux.com. “In time I ended up maintaining that and then the stable releases.” He went on to build the networking substack, and eventually went on to maintain the production tree of the Linux Kernel until 2002.
He will be missed. At least for a while.
