Mark Shuttleworth & Ubuntu

Another of my favourite Philanthrogeeks is Mark Shuttleworth. Mark sold his first business, Thawte, for $575m to Verisign, who thus formed a temporary monopoly on 128bit SSL certificates (vs the more common and less secure 40bit ones). Every ecommerce site needs one of these and they get renewed every year, so you can imagine the potential value, but after not long the tech bubble burst, and not long after that the browsers started accepting other brands of certificate[1] and I’m not sure if Verisign recouped its investment in the end. Versign later bought Network Solutions and thus obtained an actual monopoly on the .com namespace, but that’s another very long story, in which perhaps I will point out the stupidity of giving away extremely valuable worldwide monopolies to private corporations, who then get bought by bigger corporations.

As I recall the story goes that Mark then gave a million Rand to every one of his staff, including the gardener. Good show, I thought. Next I heard anything about him he had paid his way onto a soviet rocket and was going to be the first African in space. Well, lucky for some I thought.

A couple years later I heard he was forming his own Linux Distro. Cool, I thought, that should go well. It certainly did. Ubuntu is now the most popular linux distribution on the planet. That probably makes Mark one of the most important Benevolent Dictators in Open Source, and although not quite as Karma-laden as RMS or Linus Torvalds yet, he has the advantage of having a fortune in the bank and a few other philanthropic projects and foundations up his sleeve, so that definitely puts him in the upper eschalon of open source people who are really making a difference.

I see from his official bio that he’s an Iain Banks fan. I’ll post about Iain soon, who as well as being my favourite author is probably more than anyone responsible for my techoprogressive outlook on life.

Ubunto is apparently an African altruistic ideology of sorts and a word very difficult to translate into English, according to the Wikipedia entry - but frankly, it sounds pretty appealing, and perhaps it’s not a good sign that there isn’t a good English translation for it. English usually just steals any useful works from foreign languages, but at the moment, in English, “Ubuntu” means “popular linux distribution” and it may be a long time before any other meaning could shine through that. Apparently Nelson Mandela baked Ubuntu into the spirit of post-apartheid South Africa, which may have been part of the reason the transition actually sort of worked. Mandela is a pretty amazing statesman, I wish there were more like him on the world stage.

If/when I finally switch to Linux on the desktop (been using it server-side for many years) I’ll probably switch to Ubunto. I like the founder, I like the concept, and I like what I’ve seen of the distro so far. Can’t go wrong really.

[1] I know, I’m simplifying. But a discussion of how SSL certificates really work is way too technical for this blog.