Andrew Keith Paul Morton (born 1959) is an Australian

software engineer Software engineering is a branch of both computer science and engineering focused on designing, developing, testing, and maintaining software applications. It involves applying engineering principles and computer programming expertise to develop ...

. He is one of the lead developers of the

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a Free and open-source software, free and open source Unix-like kernel (operating system), kernel that is used in many computer systems worldwide. The kernel was created by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and was soon adopted as the k ...

, and a co-maintainer of the

Ext3 ext3, or third extended filesystem, is a journaling file system, journaled file system that is commonly used with the Linux kernel. It used to be the default file system for many popular Linux distributions but generally has been supplanted by ...

file system, the journaling layer for

block device In Unix-like operating systems, a device file, device node, or special file is an interface to a device driver that appears in a file system as if it were an ordinary file. There are also special files in DOS, OS/2, and Windows. These spec ...

s (JBD) and memory management.

Biography

In the late 1980s, he was one of the partners of a company in

Sydney, Australia Sydney is the capital city of the state of New South Wales and the most populous city in Australia. Located on Australia's east coast, the metropolis surrounds Sydney Harbour and extends about 80 km (50 mi) from the Pacific Ocean ...

that produced a kit computer called the Applix 1616, as well as a hardware engineer for the now-defunct Australian gaming equipment manufacturer Keno Computer Systems. He holds an

honours degree Honours degree has various meanings in the context of different degrees and education systems. Most commonly it refers to a variant of the undergraduate bachelor's degree containing a larger volume of material or a higher standard of study, ...

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

from the

University of New South Wales The University of New South Wales (UNSW) is a public research university based in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It was established in 1949. The university comprises seven faculties, through which it offers bachelor's, master's and docto ...

in Australia. Morton maintains a Linux kernel patchset known as the ''mm'' tree, which contains work-in-progress patches that might later be accepted into the official Linux tree maintained by

Linus Torvalds Linus Benedict Torvalds ( , ; born 28 December 1969) is a Finnish software engineer who is the creator and lead developer of the Linux kernel. He also created the distributed version control system Git. He was honored, along with Shinya Yam ...

. "mm" as a primary testing ground became unmanageably large and busy, and in 2008 the "linux-next" tree was created to fill much of this role. In 2001, Morton and his family moved from

Wollongong, New South Wales Wollongong ( ; Dharawal: ''Woolyungah'') is a city located in the Illawarra region of New South Wales, Australia. The name is believed to originate from the Dharawal language, meaning either 'five islands/clouds', 'ground near water' or 'sound ...

Palo Alto, California Palo Alto ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for ) is a charter city in northwestern Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. Th ...

. In July 2003, he joined the Open Source Development Labs under an agreement with his then-employer Digeo Inc. (makers of the Moxi home entertainment media center), in which OSDL supported Morton's Linux kernel development work while he continued in his official role as principal engineer at Digeo. Since August 2006, Morton has been employed by

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

and continues his current work in maintaining the kernel. Morton delivered the keynote speech at the 2004 Ottawa Linux Symposium. He was also a featured speaker at MontaVista Software's Vision 2007 Conference. He was an expert witness in the '' SCO v. IBM'' lawsuit contesting

UNIX Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

copyrights. Morton is also known by his username ''akpm'', as found in e-mail addresses and as part of the URL to his now-defunct webpage. On being asked what the initials KP stood for, he replied, "Some say 'Kernel Programmer.' My parents said 'Keith Paul.'"LKML: Andrew Morton: Re: Please revert 5b479c91da90eef605f851508744bfe8269591a0 (md partition rescan)
/ref>

References

External links

Interview: Andrew Morton
Jeremy Andrews; Kerneltrap; February 14, 2002.
Interview
Nadia Cameron; LinuxWorld; July 16, 2003.
Keynote speech; Ottawa Linux Symposium, 2004
; Ingrid Marson; ZDNet UK; May 5, 2006.
Interview
Fosdem Conference; Feb 06, 2007.
Video with Andrew Morton at Hannover Industry Trade Fair, Germany, May 2008Link to his patchesLink to his own kernel treeArchive of his now-defunct webpage
hosted by

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Morton, Andrew 1959 births Australian computer programmers Free software programmers Google employees Linux kernel programmers Living people