Alan Cox (born 1968) is a programmer heavily involved in the development of the Linux kernel since its early days (1991). Whilst employed on the campus of University of Wales, Swansea, he 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 an old branch (2.2.x), and his own versions of the previous stable branch (2.4.x) (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. He was once commonly regarded as being the "second in command" after Linus Torvalds himself. His dense and friendly comments have guided a lot of programmers on the linux kernel mailing list. Alan is employed by Red Hat and lives in Swansea, Wales with his wife, Telsa Gwynne.

He was the main developer of AberMUD, which he wrote whilst a student at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

He is an ardent supporter of programming freedom, and an outspoken opponent of software patents, the DMCA and the CBDTPA. He resigned from a subgroup of Usenix in protest, and said he would not visit the United States for fear of being imprisoned after the arrest of Dmitry Sklyarov for DMCA violations.

Cox was the recipient of the Free Software Foundation's 2003 Award for the Advancement of Free Software at the FOSDEM conference in Brussels.

External links

• His diary in Welsh
• His wife Telsa's diary
• Interview with Alan Cox - January 15, 2002
• The Swansea University Computer Society
• LugRadio interview