Andrew Keith Paul Morton | |
|---|---|
 Andrew Morton speaking at Interop,Moscow, 2008 | |
| Born | (1959-07-15)July 15, 1959 (age 66) |
| Other names | akpm |
| Education | Electrical engineering |
| Occupation | Programmer |
| Employer | |
| Known for | -mm tree |
| Spouse | Kathryn Morton |
| Children | Victoria Morton, Michael Morton, Matthew Morton |
| Parent | Prof. David Morton (deceased) |
Andrew Keith Paul Morton (born 1959) is an Australiansoftware engineer. He is one of the lead developers of theLinux kernel, and a co-maintainer of theExt3 file system, thejournaling layer forblock devices (JBD) and memory management.
In the late 1980s, he was one of the partners of a company inSydney, Australia that produced a kit computer called theApplix 1616, as well as a hardware engineer for the now-defunct Australian gaming equipment manufacturer Keno Computer Systems. He holds anhonours degree inelectrical engineering from theUniversity of New South Wales in Australia.
Morton maintains a Linux kernel patchset known as themm tree, which contains work-in-progress patches that might later be accepted into the official Linux tree maintained byLinus Torvalds. "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 fromWollongong, New South Wales toPalo Alto, California.[citation needed] In July 2003, he joined theOpen Source Development Labs under an agreement with his then-employer Digeo Inc. (makers of theMoxi 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.[1]
Since August 2006, Morton has been employed byGoogle and continues his current work in maintaining the kernel.[2][3]
Morton delivered the keynote speech at the 2004 Ottawa Linux Symposium. He was also a featured speaker atMontaVista Software's Vision 2007 Conference.[4] He was an expert witness in theSCO v. IBM lawsuit contestingUNIX copyrights.[5]
Morton is also known by his usernameakpm, 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.'"[6]
Contributors to theLinux operating system | |
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| Kernel |
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| GNU | |
| Distributions | |
| Other developers | |
| Advocates | |
| Others | |
