Andrew Morton's 2004 OLS keynote
Andrew Morton was recently honored at the 2026 Linux Storage Summit, where a tribute highlighted his influential 2004 keynote at the Ottawa Linux Symposium. This keynote addressed significant changes in the kernel's development model and its impact on the Linux project. The original transcript has been rescued and made available for those interested in this pivotal moment in Linux history.
- ▪Andrew Morton gave a keynote speech at the Ottawa Linux Symposium in 2004, shortly after a major Kernel Summit.
- ▪The transcript of Morton's keynote was previously lost but has now been recovered from the Wayback Machine.
- ▪The Ottawa Linux Symposium is a core technology conference that attracts Linux experts from around the world.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
I recently presented a brief tribute to Andrew Morton at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit; it included a suggestion that reading (or re-reading) his 2004 Ottawa Linux Symposium keynote would be instructive. This talk, given immediately after the Kernel Summit session that decided to fundamentally change the kernel's development model, tells a lot about how the kernel project got to where it is today. The text of that speech was hosted on Groklaw, and has since been replaced by crypto spam, which is rather less useful. In the hopes of preserving this seminal moment, the transcript has been rescued from the Wayback Machine and is presented here. Unfortunately, none of the links in the original remain in working order, even via the Wayback Machine.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at LWN.net (Linux Weekly News).