Showing posts with label Shuttleworth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Shuttleworth. Show all posts

28 February 2007

Mark Shuttleworth at CERN

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.