Mark Shuttleworth

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Mark Shuttleworth bigraphy, stories - South African businessman

Mark Shuttleworth : biography

18 September 1973 –

Mark Richard Shuttleworth (born 18 September 1973) is a South African entrepreneur, and space tourist

who became the first South African in space. Shuttleworth founded Canonical Ltd. and as of 2012, provides leadership for the Ubuntu operating system. He currently lives on the Isle of Man and holds dual citizenship of South Africa and the United Kingdom. 

Transport

He has a private jet, a Bombardier Global Express,Airliners.net: which is often referred to as Canonical One[https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/Issue16#head-54c204893e3c82b8629568b7372811780fcc50a4 Ubuntu News #16: Akademy 2006]Ask Slashdot: Mark Shuttleworth but is in fact owned through his HBD Venture Capital company. The dragon depicted on the side of the plane is Norman, the HBD Venture Capital mascot.

Spaceflight

In 2005, he founded the Ubuntu Foundation and made an initial investment of 10 million dollars. In the Ubuntu project, Shuttleworth is often referred to with the tongue-in-cheek title Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life, abbreviated SABDFL. To come up with a list of names of people to hire for the project, Shuttleworth took six months of Debian mailing list archives with him while travelling to Antarctica aboard the icebreaker Kapitan Khlebnikov in early 2004.Linux Format, . In September 2005, he purchased a 65% stake of Impi Linux.

On 15 October 2006, it was announced that Mark Shuttleworth became the first patron of KDE, the highest level of sponsorship available. This patronship ended in 2012, together with financial support for Kubuntu, the Ubuntu variant with KDE as main desktop.

On 17 December 2009, Mark announced that, effective March 2010, he would step down as CEO of Canonical to focus energy on product design, partnership and customers. Jane Silber, COO at Canonical since 2004, took on the job of CEO at Canonical.

In September 2010, he received an honorary degree from the Open University for this work.

On 9 November 2012. Shuttleworth and Kenneth Rogoff took part in a debate opposite Garry Kasparov and Peter Thiel at the Oxford Union, entitled "The Innovation Enigma".