"Odd things about business in the large corporate world will (hopefully) be explained," he says, including "companies who really want to do the right thing, but cannot.

"The talk will, of course, partly be tongue-in-cheek, partly be around my collection of automated musical instruments, and partly have a real message," he says.

Talking about the latest version of the Linux kernel, David Miller will pay particular attention to the TCP stack and innovations such as TCP Segmentation Offload. This delegates the task of splitting up overlarge transmission packets to the network card, efficiently accommodating the maximum transmission unit (MTU) limitation of the medium, while still being able to send packets as large as 64KB.

Born and raised in South Africa, Mark Shuttleworth founded Thawte, a company specializing in digital certificates and internet privacy. He sold Thawte to US certificate king VeriSign in 1999 and founded HBD Venture Capital and The Shuttleworth Foundation.

The topic of his keynote address will be "improving collaboration between open source projects."