Alan Cox [LWN.net]

Alan Cox

Posted Jul 18, 2013 21:03 UTC (Thu) by dougg (guest, #1894)
Parent article: On kernel mailing list behavior

Now there was a class act: respected, perceptive and a great way of getting his point across with humour. Probably his best skill was dealing with competing egos on the list. Worked on drivers that no-one dared to touch. And his reward was a verbal bucket of !@#$ poured on him for his serial/tty driver work by the big ego himself.

Hopefully the past tense for Alan is only temporary.

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Alan Cox

Posted Jul 19, 2013 10:30 UTC (Fri) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (1 responses)

Very good example. LWN's report from 2009 is here. It shows that it's not just a problem for newbies: even the most senior developers (Alan was once seen as second only to Linus) can take only so much of Linus's flaming.

Alan Cox

Posted Jul 19, 2013 18:23 UTC (Fri) by jonabbey (guest, #2736) [Link]

I thought that exchange was a good reference point for this discussion as well.

I didn't see Linus flaming Alan in any kind of abusive way, but he was certainly being demanding. Alan decided he had had enough of that, and went away, and he had every right to, but I didn't see anything abusive.