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, United Kingdom.

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.

External Link:

http://www.linux.org.uk/diary/ - His diary
http://www.linux.org.uk/~telsa/Diary/diary.html - His wife Telsa's diary