Alan Cox (computer programmer)

Alan Cox (born 22 July 1968) is a British computer programmer who has been a key figure in the development of Linux. He maintained the 2.2 branch of the Linux kernel and continues to be heavily involved in its development, an association that dates back to 1991. He lives in Swansea, Wales, where he lived with his wife Telsa Gwynne, who died in 2015 and now lives with author Tara Neale, whom he married in 2020. He graduated with a BSc in Computer Science from Swansea University in 1991 and received an MBA from the same university in 2005. While employed on the campus of Swansea University, Cox installed a very early version of Linux on one of the machines belonging to the university computer society. This was one of the first Linux installations on a busy network and revealed many bugs in the networking code. Cox fixed many of these bugs and went on to rewrite much of the networking subsystem. He then became one of the main developers and maintainers of the whole kernel. He maintained the 2.2 branch, and his own versions of the 2.4 branch (signified by an "ac" in the version, for example 2.4.13-ac1). This branch was very stable and contained bugfixes that went directly into the vendor kernels. Cox was once commonly regarded as being the "second in command" after Linus Torvalds himself, before reducing his involvement with Linux to study for an MBA. On 28 July 2009, Cox quit his role as the TTY layer maintainer, after disagreement with Torvalds about the scope of work required to fix an error in that subsystem. Alan was employed by the Linux distributor Red Hat during 1999–2009. Starting from 2011 he was employed by Intel Corporation but left both Intel and Linux kernel development in January 2013 to care full-time for his wife during a critical period of medical treatment, and returned to both later that year, until taking early retirement at the end of 2019. He has also been involved in the GNOME and X.Org projects, and was the main developer of AberMUD, which he wrote whilst a student at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.