ITWales.com

Catching up with Alan Cox

By Basheera Khan

Welsh language computing
Is it a horse or a newspaper?
Open source for small business
Plans for the future

While the open source community has had to bid a brief farewell to Alan Cox during his year-long academic sabbatical, residents and visitors to the University of Wales Swansea are routinely treated to the sight of his red fedora bobbing through the crowds.

A kernel hacker in the employ of Red Hat and widely accepted as second only to Linus Torvalds himself in the echelons of open source illuminati, Cox has taken some time off to pursue an MBA, and managed to catch up with itwales.com despite a schedule packed with assignments and exams.

He's finding it fairly enjoyable so far, says Cox, because though he hasn't learned anything particularly revelatory, it's providing him with valuable theory behind decision-making in business.

"A lot of it is taking things where instinctively you're doing some of it, and actually saying this is why it happens. I know that's how I would've done it, but now I know why. And especially with regard to marketing and economics, understanding the theory behind the decisions is important."

Cox is about a third of the way through the course, and though he says he's not entirely clear on what topic he'll base his thesis, he's fairly certain it will have some technical bearing. The obvious choice, he says, is to study something technical from a business perspective.

"A lot of the MBA is very much about that; it's all very well knowing how to build a great piece of software but the MBA also wants to look at how you market it, how you account for it, how you make money, how the economics of it work, and other issues which you can't ignore."

The year-long course is intensive and demanding, with subjects being dealt with over five-week modules. Cox explains: "It varies over the five-week period; the first week is kind of relaxed because there's not a great deal to do, just a few assignments. Lecture time is not that high - but they keep giving you more and more assignments, and then just as you've got all the assignments under control, you have to revise madly for the exam. So it's full-time - I'm probably spending 40 hours a week on it. For all the fact that you think we've got 12 hours of lectures this week, and I haven't got to get up until midday, the reality is a little different."

Welsh language computing

Nevertheless, Cox is keeping his hand in; he's in touch with colleagues at Red Hat, and occasionally does some technical work for the project translating the KDE and Gnome desktop environments into Welsh. It's being undertaken by KGyfieithu, a project his wife Telsa Gwynn is heavily involved in.

Cox's involvement is fairly limited - as an intermediate Welsh learner, his main task is to supply the Welsh language speakers with a steady stream of tea. He is also, he admits, the token right-hander.

A graduate of the University of Wales Swansea, Cox is a lifetime member of the Swansea University Computer Society (SUCS), and has used his time on campus to effect a rollout of a Welsh language desktop for the SUCS machines over the Christmas break.

"We're one up on the University for once!" he says with not a little glee.

Universities are just one of the places where Welsh language computing is valuable, he says. Often, people react with surprise at the mention of computers running in Welsh, simply because they never thought of it as a possibility.

But it's a movement gaining increasing support; the Welsh Assembly Government is committed to supporting a bilingual society, and for non-native Welsh speakers, switching to a Welsh desktop environment is one of the quickest ways to learn. Cox himself runs a Welsh PC for that very reason.

He comments: "My computer speaks much better Welsh than I do, and occasionally I dive for the dictionary to find out where a menu item has gone, but it's a learning thing."

Introducing Welsh language software could also address elements of the digital divide. Cox says: "People like Rhoslyn Prys at Canolfan Bedwyr very much see it as computing and the Internet are the future. So from their point of view, if there's not Welsh language computing, then in the future there will not be a Welsh language. They see it that black and white."

As to his own progress with Welsh, Cox says: "I can hold my own in a conversation providing it's a simple one and providing the Welsh speaker is aware I'm a learner. I'm by no means fluent - if you've been learning a language for a year, you can struggle through bits of newspaper, you could probably read most of the news as long as you have a dictionary handy, but the spoken stuff I find much more challenging; I can't listen to S4C and understand it - I pick bits out, and some of the rugby commentary I can follow, but that's it."

Is it a horse or a newspaper?

One of Cox's last high profile activities before going on sabbatical was the co-authoring with Linus Torvalds of an open letter to the European Parliament on the much debated proposed Directive on the Patentability of Computer-Implemented Inventions.

The draft directive has been presented as a harmonisation of European patent laws, which differ across member states. Those in favour believe the directive will help small businesses by making the legal framework for software or electronic business processes more consistent.

The opposition camp, including Cox and Torvalds, economists, computer scientists, supporters of the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII), and small business representation groups, criticised the original wording of the directive, saying that it would allow for virtually anything computer-related to patented - a situation that already exists in the US.

A number of important amendments have been made to the directive, and voting has been delayed until April 2004, by which time the Presidency of the EU will be in the hands of the Irish.

While Cox is undecided as to whether this will affect the vote, he is concerned that various European governments might band together to circumvent the European Parliament entirely - the EU isn't quite as democratic as perhaps it should be sometimes, is his comment.

Nevertheless, he agrees that despite the somewhat questionable motivations of some lobbying groups - particularly those representing the music industry and big software companies - members of the European Parliament have a much better idea of the issues than they had before.

"The amendments made are by no means perfect, but they've done a passable job in trying to find some sort of compromise to figure out what's going to work in the real world. I think the lobbying has helped, but until the free software people got heavily involved in the way they did, particularly the FFII and people like that, [the European Parliament] would have had a picture solely from the lawyers of large companies, because small companies don't tend to have much influence or deal with things from the European Union directly, unfortunately - even though the EU would love this, and so would the UK."

"I think that the members now have a much better idea of the fact that the only people saying that patents are better for small business, are large business. The only people that are saying a lot of the modern patent stuff is good for the near-fictitious individual inventor, are large companies. All the small inventors are going, it just doesn't work, because unless your company is at least the size of Dyson, you cannot afford to fight a patent lawsuit."

"So for a small company, it's a large administrative cost filing all these software patents, a large administrative cost searching for others and at the end of the day it's completely valueless because if a big company violates your patent, there's nothing you can do about it, but if you violate their patent they will just see you out of existence."

The problem doesn't lie with the fundamental principle of patents, Cox says, but rather in the way that the system works.

"The basic idea of patents is that you want to create an incentive for people to go off, do research and make it public, so that things don't stay secret, they don't get lost and they get recorded. The question is really then how you fix the patent system to work, and how all these different things like software can be treated. "

"Software is particularly awkward, because it's neither speech nor machine. The cause of a lot of problems with software is that to an extent with UK law, but especially US law, divides everything into a horse or a newspaper."

"If it's a horse, then it's machinery, it's all about trademarks, protection, patents, copyrights, etc, and business. If it's a newspaper, then the entire thing is about freedom of speech, freedom of distribution, opinion, etc. The problem with a computer is it's a newspaper and a horse at the same time. Because a piece of software can be both."

"Take the cryptography work which broke the DVD encryption algorithm. It's both an academic work on cryptography, a device which plays DVDs you legitimately own, and a device for allowing to pirate things. It's all of them at once. We've always had things which were two at once - a gun is both a device for hunting with and for committing crimes with, and we've always had to deal with these, and you strike a balance."

"But a lot of that really hasn't happened properly in the computing world yet, partly because there are some very powerful interests like the music industry who want it to happen solely on their terms, not in terms of what the general good of society is," he says.

The problem lies in figuring out the trade-offs in compromise, and in working towards a situation in which businesses can have faith in legislation to deal with piracy, Cox believes. Equally, governments need to commit themselves to a level playing field, or risk the wrath of the consumer. Cox cites the situation which currently exists in the DVD market, whereby hardware has been deliberately engineered to create the effect of a partitioned world - allowing companies to price their products differently, depending on each region. As Cox succinctly sums it up, consumers just don't like that.

"You have to recognise that there are all these cases where technology wants to be able to break protection. So there are people who break DVD protection because there wasn't a DVD player for their machine even though they've bought the rights to watch the movie. There are people who break DVD protection because they want to study certain excerpts of it and skip around in ways that a mainstream player won't let them. People like the blind are finding difficulty in reading electronic books."

"The fact that British government in its legislation on copyright prevents blind people from circumventing that, really makes you wonder given that they actually have some blind senior members of the Cabinet. What would happen if somebody gave David Blunkett an electronic book that he couldn't read? He's helped pass legislation saying he can go to jail if he tries to. "

Cox knows from experience that the legislative world is desperate for feedback from small companies. This, he says, is where the Internet becomes really useful.

"One thing the Internet has done is that it made it easier for lots of small organisations to get together. Companies aren't doing this a great deal yet, but the Internet makes interacting as a group, like the Federation of Small Business has, much more efficient. So I think we are going to see much more of that with business of all sizes. The FaxYourMP.com website is a classic example, businesses are using that.

"Apart from that, I think small business is just going to have to learn, as large business gains influence, particularly over Europe, that they're going to have to stand out and be heard, because they're not going to be able to afford not to."

Open source for small business

When advising small business on the best way to migrate to open source software, Cox says he would say the same thing he says to big companies - it's important to make the transition step by step.

"Linux is designed to inter-work as much as possible with Windows, because in the free software world there is no interest in locking you in to a single solution. And what that means is that for example, you can look at Linux as a web server, Linux as a firewall, play with Linux in different roles. The worst possible thing you can do is walk into an office, switch all the computers over to Linux and expect the results to be smooth - it doesn't work that way."

His other comment is that learning and training costs will always have to be factored into any change.

"The learning is getting easier; the number of students and graduates around, and people who know their stuff is much higher than before, but anything which is a change does involve learning. It's normally okay - people pick up OpenOffice and go, 'Oh! It's kind of like Word, but a bit different.' But some of the other stuff isn't that simple."

"The biggest misconception about using Linux is that it means going back to a command line interface. The Gnome desktop and KDE desktop is very Windows-like, you have the same kind of facilities, roughly the same kind of mentality, some differences here and there, but it's a graphical environment with graphical configuration tools. You can use the command line if you want to, but it's a tool rather than a requirement."

As far as challenges to high tech business in Wales go, Cox believes the hardest obstacle to overcome is finding private sector funding.

"Private sector investment in the UK is problematic anyway - it's very hard for example to get long-term capital in the UK, because everyone is focussed on short term returns, the banks included. Things like that mean that we have Amazon.co.uk, not a large UK-based bookseller on the Internet."

It's also becoming more of an issue to try to retain Welsh computing skills within the country - as Cox says, things like Objective 1 funding potentially creates business, but the powers that be have got to do something about retaining people who were born here, or who come here, with the right skills.

"You can't develop a large software company here, because all your potential workforce has already moved to Swindon. So I think that the Technium [project] will be good for that, in terms of getting more technology businesses appearing - but there is a general problem with lack of capital. There's plenty of business support out there, but if anything there's a problem because there's too many different sources of it. I also think there's a lot of people losing out on the grants as well, because it's a bit complicated to apply."

Plans for the future

Cox spends what little spare time he has learning Welsh and doing "a little bit" for Red Hat, to which he'll return once the MBA course is over. There, he says, he'll probably continue doing some work on the kernel, but whether he works exclusively on the kernel is not yet decided.

"I've been doing lots of work on X-server stuff recently, display stuff, bits of graphical applications, so who knows. I'm starting to get more involved in the desktop stuff; I've done human interface work before."

In particular, he says, he is very interested in the work involved in readying Linux appliances for the Web.

"There's a measure of community of people, where you can take the people to the computer, so to speak. But there's a large community of people where you have to take the technology to the people and give it to them in their own terms. There are lots of people who don't have a PC, or who have a PC but don't think of it as a personal computer - it's their Internet thingy."

"You've got to take computing to those kinds of people and you can't do it by teaching them computing - it won't happen. Maybe in 30 years' time everybody will be casually banging out Perl scripts and writing command line programs but not at the moment."

[13/10/2003] : Welsh PC available by 2004
[21/07/2003] : Welsh Linux on the cards
[05/03/2002] : Public lecture: Alan Cox
[12/02/2002] : Alan Cox, Kernel Hacker, Linux