3 Mar
2009

Posted in: Stories
By Prajith    4 Comments

The Ubuntu Story

If someone asks about the personalities that I admire, surely this man named “Mark Shuttleworth” would be there in my list.

He is the founder of one of the cutting edge and most popular linux distribution Ubuntu.

Shuttleworth was born in Welkom, Free State, South Africa as a son of a surgeon and a kindergarten teacher. He studied   finance and information technology at the University of Cape Town.

In his early stage of his career,  he lived in Smuts Hall, where he was involved in the installation of the first residential Internet connections at the university.

And after that he found   Thawte, a company specialising in digital certificates and cryptography.

This company was basically a sucess and in 1999 he  sold Thawte to US company VeriSign (about US$ 575 million at the time).

In 2001 he formed the Shuttleworth Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to social innovation which also funds educational and free and open source software projects in South Africa, such as the Freedom Toaster.

On  25 April 2002  he became the first African  self-funded spaceflight participant.  He payed pproximately US$ 20 million for this voyage !!

In early 2004, Mark founded the Ubuntu project, which aims to produce a high quality desktop and server operating system that is freely available all over the world.

http://www.ubuntu.com/

And Now ubuntu is the No:1 linux distribution, both desktop and server version.

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