Alan Cox

Alan Cox is a programmer heavily involved in the development of the Linux kernel, maintaining the next-to-latest branch (2.2.x), and his own versions of the current branch (signified by an "ac" in the version, for example 2.4.3-ac1). He is commonly regarded as being the "second in command" after Linus Torvalds himself.

He was one of the people involved in AberMUD.

Cox is employed by Red Hat and lives in Wales.

He is an ardent supporter of programming freedom, and an an outspoken opponent of [software patents]?, the DMCA and the SSSCA?. 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.