Andrew Keith Paul Morton (born 1959) is an Australian

software engineer Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term ''p ...

, best known as one of the lead developers of the

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ...

. He is currently a co-maintainer of the

Ext3 ext3, or third extended filesystem, is a journaled file system that is commonly used by the Linux kernel. It used to be the default file system for many popular Linux distributions. Stephen Tweedie first revealed that he was working on ext ...

file system, the journaling layer for

block device In Unix-like operating systems, a device file 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 special files allow a ...

s (JBD) and Memory Management. In the late 1980s, he was one of the partners of a company in

Sydney, Australia Sydney ( ) is the capital city of the States and territories of Australia, state of New South Wales, and the most populous city in both Australia and List of cities in Oceania by population, Oceania. Located on Australia's east coast, the metro ...

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, or ...

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which 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), also known as UNSW Sydney, is a public research university based in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It is one of the founding members of Group of Eight, a coalition of Australian research-intensiv ...

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, historically, the lead developer of the Linux kernel, used by Linux distributions and other operating systems such as Android. He also ...

. "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, Andrew Morton and his family moved from

Wollongong, New South Wales Wollongong ( ), colloquially referred to as The Gong, 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 wat ...

Palo Alto, California Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. The city was es ...

. In July 2003, Morton 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, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

and continues his current work in maintaining the kernel. Andrew Morton delivered the keynote speech at the 2004 Ottawa Linux Symposium. He was also a featured speaker at

MontaVista MontaVista Software is a company that develops embedded Linux system software, development tools, and related software. Its products are made for other corporations developing embedded systems such as automotive electronics, communications ...

Software's Vision 2007 Conference. He was an expert witness in the ''

SCO v. IBM ''SCO Group, Inc. v. International Business Machines Corp.'', commonly abbreviated as ''SCO v. IBM'', is a civil lawsuit in the United States District Court of Utah. The SCO Group asserted that there are legal uncertainties regarding the use o ...

'' lawsuit contesting

UNIX Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser 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, ...

copyrights. Andrew 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 digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

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