Cox was the recipient of the Free Software Foundation's 2003 Award for the Advancement of Free Software at the FOSDEM conference in Brussels.
On 5 October 2005, Cox received a lifetime achievement award at the LinuxWorld awards in London.
The University of Wales Trinity Saint David Awarded Cox an Honorary Fellowship on 18 July 2013.
He received an honorary doctorate from the Swansea University, his Alma Mater, on 20 July 2016.
Alan was employed by the Linux distributor Red Hat during 1999–2009. Starting from 2011 he was employed by Intel Corporation but left both Intel and Linux kernel development in January 2013 to care full-time for his wife during a critical period of medical treatment, and returned to both later that year.
Cox was the recipient of the Free Software Foundation's 2003 Award for the Advancement of Free Software at the FOSDEM conference in Brussels.
On 5 October 2005, Cox received a lifetime achievement award at the LinuxWorld awards in London.
In January 2007, he applied for a series of patents on "RMS", or rights management systems. It is said that he has filed a patent for digital rights management. Red Hat Inc., Cox's former employer, has stated (in a document drafted by Mark Webbink and Cox himself) that it will not use patents against free software projects.
On 28 July 2009, Cox quit his role as the TTY layer maintainer, after disagreement with Torvalds about the scope of work required to fix an error in that subsystem.
The University of Wales Trinity Saint David Awarded Cox an Honorary Fellowship on 18 July 2013.
He received an honorary doctorate from the Swansea University, his Alma Mater, on 20 July 2016.
