Alan Cox is moving on from Red Hat

[Posted December 23, 2008 by ris]

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

Alan Cox is moving on from Red Hat

Posted Dec 23, 2008 19:39 UTC (Tue) by cma (guest, #49905) [Link] (3 responses)

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] (2 responses)

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.

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] (1 responses)

"""
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]

I'm puzzeled by these reactions.

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?

Welcome

Posted Dec 23, 2008 22:35 UTC (Tue) by dwmw2 (subscriber, #2063) [Link]

Alan Cox is moving on from Red Hat

Posted Dec 24, 2008 20:54 UTC (Wed) by sci3ntist (guest, #46657) [Link]

Good Luck Alan

What's in it for Intel?

Posted Dec 25, 2008 1:02 UTC (Thu) by sbishop (guest, #33061) [Link] (10 responses)

This doesn't have anything to do with Alan Cox, but I have always wondered what Intel's motivation is to support open-source software, and Linux in particular. Can anyone fill me in?

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]

As Bdale Garbee put it in his talk about HP & Debian at DebConf8:

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] (4 responses)

re-read your statement and substatute nVidia for Intel.

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] (3 responses)

Note that two of the three (ATI and Intel) "big three" already meaningfully cooperate with the open source community (being followed by some other ones -- VIA).

What's in it for Intel?

Posted Dec 26, 2008 21:03 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

they do now, but for several years Intel was the only one that did. and ATI's cooperation (through AMD) is very recent (recent enough that it hasn't had much impact yet)

What's in it for Intel?

Posted Dec 26, 2008 21:12 UTC (Fri) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link] (1 responses)

Recent? IIRC -- a year and half. And you apparently don't have the right distribution, Dave Airlie provided tons and tons of fixes to -ati driver, and people (mainly) from OpenSuSE created -radeonhd using that information. That's pretty big impact in my books.

What's in it for Intel?

Posted Dec 26, 2008 21:15 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

great, I thought it was about a year and didn't think that the updates had made it in yet. I'm glad to to be wrong about that.

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]

Intel and Microsoft are in here for the money and Microsoft has shown little hesitation in the past to kill Intel projects by not supporting them in Windows when it felt they didn't align with its strategy.

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]

On the "What's in it for Intel" section, I think it is important to recognize that the big gains Linux has been making has not been stealing Wintel thunder, it has been taking customers from the likes of Sun, HP, and IBM on big unix hardware. The transition was not complicated, and when you combined a free enterprise grade OS with essentially commodity hardware, your price / performance numbers ( even in the TPC realm ) became a killer way to sell more cpus, motherboards, nics, etc.. etc.. for Intel. This is old news already. I agree with the person above, there is no reason to question the motives of a large company like Intel. They are in it for the money, not because ( and this makes me smile ) they love Debian.

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] (1 responses)

Thank you for your time with Red Hat and Fedora Alan, I hope you find much happiness working with Intel.

Alan Cox is moving on from Red Hat

Posted Dec 29, 2008 17:08 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

I don't consider his time with Fedora as mutually exclusive to his time in Intel. In all probability, it won't be. With a project like Fedora, a change in your employer, needn't have any material impact.

Alan Cox is moving on from Red Hat

Posted Dec 30, 2008 8:16 UTC (Tue) by error27 (subscriber, #8346) [Link]

Dealing with "low level stuff" is a code phrase for not having to deal with all those boring RHEL support requests and bugzilla.