Now that English-born Aussie Andrew Morton, Linux' second-ranking kernel hacker, has resolved what friends described as his US visa issues, he has "taken a job" with Google. In other words, Google is going to pay his salary while he continues to act as the 2.6 kernel's maintainer full-time.

Nominally Morton, an OSDL Fellow like Linux creator Linus Torvalds, has been working for Digeo Inc, the digital entertainment house backed primarily - not to say ironically - by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, but evidently that situation quietly changed a while back during a Digeo layoff and OSDL has been picking up the tab for Morton.

Morton acknowledged his move to Google last week in a posting on the Linux kernel mailing list.

He expects to be happy with an office at Google, which has its own Linux distribution. He is quoted as saying, "It is beneficial to me - and to Linux - that I be in day-to-day contact with people who use Linux for real things."

He also apparently feels that "I should not be employed by a company which has a direct interest in the kernel.org kernel because this would put me in a position of making decisions which are commercially significant to my employer's competitors."