Who is Mark Shuttleworth, and how is he related to Ubuntu?

Solution 1:

Mark Shuttleworth is an entrepreneur from South Africa who founded the Ubuntu operating system through his company, Canonical.

• Before founding Canonical, he was the founder of Thawte, a company he founded in 1995 to provide digital certificates and internet security. Thawte has since been sold to Verisign.

• Shuttleworth was a Debian Developer in the 1990s.

• Shuttleworth founded his company Canonical LTD in 2004, a company dedicated to supporting free software.

• Through his company Canonical LTD, he founded the Ubuntu operating system in 2004. Ubuntu is a derivative software product of Debian. Canonical still governs and supports the Ubuntu operating system to this day and Ubuntu continues to be a product based on Debian.

• He set up the Ubuntu Foundation in 2005 with an initial donation of $10 million USD of his own funds.

• He remained the CEO of Canonical LTD until 2010, when he stepped down to focus on other responsibilities within Canonical and Ubuntu.

• Shuttleworth is also famous for being the second ever self-funded space tourist (funded a trip to space with his own money) and the first ever South African in space.