Alan Cox is moving on from Red Hat
| From: | Alan Cox <alan-AT-lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> | |
| To: | editor-AT-lwn.net, editor-AT-lxer.com | |
| Subject: | Moving on from Red Hat | |
| Date: | Tue, 23 Dec 2008 16:13:09 +0000 | |
| Message-ID: | <20081223161309.6af6ea3f@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> |
I will be departing Red Hat mid January having handed in my notice. I'm not going to be spending more time with the family, gardening[1] or other such wonderous things. I'm leaving on good terms and strongly supporting the work Red Hat is doing. I've been at Red Hat for ten years as contractor and employee and now have an opportunity to get even closer to the low level stuff that interests me most. Barring last minute glitches I shall be relocating to Intel (logically at least, physically I'm not going anywhere) and still be working on Linux and free software stuff. I know some people will wonder what it means for Red Hat engineering. Red Hat has a solid, world class, engineering team and my departure will have no effect on their ability to deliver. Alan [1] I note that both the family and garden probably think I should
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Alan Cox is moving on from Red Hat
Posted Dec 23, 2008 19:35 UTC (Tue) by vonbrand (guest, #4458) [Link]
Many thanks for your work up to now. I just hope to see you around another 10 or 30 years.
Alan Cox is moving on from Red Hat
Posted Dec 23, 2008 19:39 UTC (Tue) by cma (guest, #49905) [Link]
Good luck for your new venture! Keep up the good work, obviously, on Linux land! ;)
Alan Cox is moving on from Red Hat
Posted Dec 23, 2008 19:53 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Having hardware vendors employee people to engage in upstream development work is a very good thing. Having them chose to employ people who can positively impact internal corporate culture by helping to sustain and grow an open development culture is even better. Hopefully Alan won't just be hacking on kernel code. Hopefully he will be in a position to help to sustain and grow Intel's internal open development efforts into a corporate-wide culture.
-jef
Alan Cox is moving on from Red Hat
Posted Dec 24, 2008 3:44 UTC (Wed) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
It's really good to seeing Intel making stronger manpower investments into the linux ecosystem. A close relationship between hardware vendors like Intel and upstream open software development projects makes for a stronger ecosystem.
"""
Indeed. These kinds of moves matter more, in a way, than Oracle's grand announcement that it would be supporting its database on Linux back in (what was it?) the late 90s. The FOSS invasion has begun in earnest. Because we're all part of the mainstream. We are them, and they are us, mostly. Except that we have some different ideas.
Alan Cox is moving on from Red Hat
Posted Dec 24, 2008 16:18 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]
it's not like Alan is the first, or even the tenth person Intel has hired to work on opensource projects, so this isn't an indication of any significant change in Intel, it's just one more person (admittedly one who has been extremely productive over the years).
when a company starts hiring opensource people for the first time, or makes a drastic increase in the size of the team I could see comments like this being warrented, but we don't make comments like this when RedHat or Novell hire one more developer (or even 10 more developers). for that matter Google could hire 100 more developers without earning comments like this.
is it just that people don't realize that Intel isn't a newcomer to opensource?
Alan Cox is moving on from Red Hat
Posted Dec 24, 2008 20:54 UTC (Wed) by sci3ntist (guest, #46657) [Link]
What's in it for Intel?
Posted Dec 25, 2008 1:02 UTC (Thu) by sbishop (guest, #33061) [Link]
I don't see how Intel benefits if Linux takes market share from Windows; the hardware is the same. Linux taking market share from Unix probably doesn't do much for Intel either; I expect that if it wasn't Linux in those cases it would be Windows.
Does Intel need to make sure that Linux runs well on its hardware? It would seem to be in the interest of anyone attempting to promote Linux to make sure that it runs well on Intel hardware; in other words, I imagine that it would happen whether or not Intel got involved.
Along with all that, Linux is one way of breathing new life into old hardware, which would seem to be the opposite of what Intel would want.
What's in it for Intel?
Posted Dec 25, 2008 1:48 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]
http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/20...
They do it for the profit - "Don't ever be confused that something that is being done because we love Debian or because we love open source or free software or something" at about 32 min in.
What's in it for Intel?
Posted Dec 25, 2008 2:16 UTC (Thu) by dark (guest, #8483) [Link]
Intel is not the only maker of chips to run Linux on! By making sure that Linux can use every feature of their chipsets, and squeezes every bit of speed out of their processors, Intel can become the platform of choice for Linux systems. That way they can take market share from AMD and Via. For Linux users, there's little difference between "Linux runs faster on Intel chips" and "Intel chips are faster".In addition, there's the effect of software being complementary to hardware. People buy software and hardware together. If Intel can bring the price of software down, then there's more money for the hardware. This will expand their market.
What's in it for Intel?
Posted Dec 25, 2008 6:14 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]
now think about the state of video support on Linux
also remember that Intel makes a lot more than just CPUs, they have network cards, video cards, sound cards, etc. each of these needs a driver team at the very least.
In some areas (networking for example) I think they just pay driver development teams.
In other areas (Video for example), they not only pay driver developers, they also pay developers to work on the underlying subsystems to implement new features and better take advantage of the capabilities of the chips
What's in it for Intel?
Posted Dec 26, 2008 20:29 UTC (Fri) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link]
What's in it for Intel?
Posted Dec 26, 2008 21:03 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]
What's in it for Intel?
Posted Dec 26, 2008 21:12 UTC (Fri) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link]
What's in it for Intel?
Posted Dec 26, 2008 21:15 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]
Linux as AC 97 sound
Posted Dec 27, 2008 0:21 UTC (Sat) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]
A customer's computer budget is only so big, and Intel wants a bigger share of it. If a customer buys a expensive Creative Labs card instead of using the generic Intel sound hardware on the motherboard, that's a smaller fraction of the budget going to Intel. Same for graphics, and every other part of the system -- there's a cheap generic version that customers can choose in order to spend more on the Intel processor and chipset.Supporting Linux is just giving customers another cheap generic option.
Re: What's in it for Intel?
Posted Dec 27, 2008 6:05 UTC (Sat) by ldo (guest, #40946) [Link]
Commoditize your complement.
What's in it for Intel?
Posted Dec 29, 2008 8:35 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
OTOH AMD's x86-64 succeeded in part thanks to 64bit support by Linux server-side years before Windows was ready.
For a hardware manufacturer good Linux support is insurance its new hardware won't be killed due to lack of interest Microsoft-side.
Alan Cox is moving on from Red Hat
Posted Dec 27, 2008 14:38 UTC (Sat) by pglennon (guest, #649) [Link]
In terms of Alan Cox, it's pretty amazing to review his career so far in various capacities and his impact to the adoption of Linux. Does anyone remember the name/story of the high level guy at HP that had a picture of Alan on his desk? He was massively pushing Linux at HP back then... have to look that up, but it solidified Alan's contribution in my mind above the normal hacking, publicity, critique of intellectual property, etc.. etc.. Glad to see he is not fully going to work in his garden ;)
I'd put up a picture of Alan as well, but it would scare my kids ( no offense! )
-P
Alan Cox is moving on from Red Hat
Posted Dec 28, 2008 23:07 UTC (Sun) by Lovechild (guest, #3592) [Link]
Alan Cox is moving on from Red Hat
Posted Dec 29, 2008 17:08 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Alan Cox is moving on from Red Hat
Posted Dec 30, 2008 8:16 UTC (Tue) by error27 (subscriber, #8346) [Link]
