Rusty Russell is an Australian free software programmer and advocate, known for his work on the Linux kernel's networking subsystem and the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.

[3] In 2002, Russell announced the creation of the Trivial Patch Monkey, an email address for kernel hackers to submit trivial patches such as spelling errors, one-liners, documentation tweaks and other minor amendments to the code base.

In 2006[4] Russell started work as the major developer of the "lguest" virtualisation system in the Linux Kernel.

[7][8] Rusty Russell authored the majority part of Bitcoin's Lightning Network protocol specification.

[11] Russell was the recipient of the inaugural (and eponymous) Rusty Wrench award for service to the free software community at linux.conf.au 2005.