Alan Cox is so well-regarded in the open-source software community that he can pull in a crowd of eager techies to discuss theoretical software stability on a Sunday afternoon, as he did at last year's FOSDEM conference in Brussels. Cox wrote much of the original networking subsystem in Linux more than a decade ago, and he has maintained and contributed code toward various kernel releases. Now employed by Linux vendor Red Hat, he is a leading figure in the open-source software community. Last week, after Cox's talk at a Trusted Computing conference in London, <A HREF="http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9593_22-6034218.html?tag=zdnn.alert">ZDNet UK spoke to him</A> about a wide range of topics, including the next version of the General Public License, software patents, the kernel development process and Linux on the desktop.