Alan Cox and the End of an Era

Dec 24, 2008, 16:34 (3 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Glyn Mody)

"Cox was born in Solihull, and studied at universities in Wales. He was a keen Amiga hacker, and contemplated writing an entirely new operating system for that machine, but decided that "writing file system stuff was too hard for one person to do." So he was naturally impressed to discover that a crazy Finn had done precisely that, as he learned through following the Minix newsgroups where Linus made his early announcements. Cox began hacking on version 0.11 of the kernel, and was soon involved in one of the most important projects of the nascent operating system: getting the networking sorted out.

"After this crucial contribution, Cox effectively became Number 2 in the Linux kernel devlopment team. As such, he was a natural candidate for Red Hat when the company started making hackers offers they couldn't refuse."

Complete Story

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