He, no matter what the picture on the left will let you think, is of course the founder of the Ubuntu project. And he was just here, today, for a conference about Open Source Software: The Challenge Ahead. I moved to the conference only to see him, because I had no idea of what could be the appearance of the man at the source of my OS-passion.
There I found a guy − yes, he is only 4 years older than me! − just like the one in the photo down-right here, dressing blue jeans and exactly that black sweatshirt. And I come to know that he
- started as a Debian developer (ok, this was obvious)
- founded a company, Thawte, specialized in digital certificates and than he sold it to Verisign for more than half a billion bucks.
formed the Shuttleworth Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to social innovation which also funds educational and open source projects in South Africa, such as The Freedom Toaster.- spent eight days aboard the International Space Station as a civilian cosmonaut, participating in experiments related to AIDS and genome research (yes, the one in the picture on the top-left is just him).
- started the development of Ubuntu and then founded the Ubuntu Foundation
And today he was here, just a few meters apart from me, speaking about something as common in my life as the open source software.
PS
Concerning the K in front of my OS-passion, on 15 October 2006 it was announced that Mark Shuttleworth became the first patron of KDE, the highest level of sponsorship available.
