Mark Richard Shuttleworth (born 18 September 1973) is a South African and British entrepreneur who is the founder and CEO of

Canonical The adjective canonical is applied in many contexts to mean "according to the canon" the standard, rule or primary source that is accepted as authoritative for the body of knowledge or literature in that context. In mathematics, "canonical examp ...

, the company behind the development of the Linux-based

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: '' Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All ...

operating system. In 2002, Shuttleworth became the first

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the Atlantic Ocean, South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the ...

n to travel to space as a

space tourist Space tourism is human space travel for recreational purposes. There are several different types of space tourism, including orbital, suborbital and lunar space tourism. During the period from 2001 to 2009, seven space tourists made eight s ...

, and the first African from an independent country to travel to space. He lives on the

Isle of Man ) , anthem = "O Land of Our Birth" , image = Isle of Man by Sentinel-2.jpg , image_map = Europe-Isle_of_Man.svg , mapsize = , map_alt = Location of the Isle of Man in Europe , map_caption = Location of the Isle of Man (green) in Europe ...

and holds

dual citizenship Multiple/dual citizenship (or multiple/dual nationality) is a legal status in which a person is concurrently regarded as a national or citizen of more than one country under the laws of those countries. Conceptually, citizenship is focused on ...

from South Africa and the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the European mainland, continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...

. According to the '' Sunday Times Rich List'' in 2020, Shuttleworth is worth an estimated £500 million.

Early life

Shuttleworth was born in

Welkom Welkom () is the second-largest city in the Free State province of South Africa, located about northeast of Bloemfontein which is the provincial capital. Welkom is also known as Circle City, City Within A Garden, Mvela and Matjhabeng. The ci ...

, Free State, South Africa, to a surgeon and a nursery-school teacher, Shuttleworth attended school at Western Province Preparatory School (where he eventually became

Head Boy Head boy and head girl are student leadership roles in schools, representing the school's entire student body. They are normally the most senior prefects in the school. The terms are commonly used in the British education system as well as in Aus ...

in 1986), followed by one term at Rondebosch Boys' High School, and then at Bishops/

Diocesan College The Diocesan College (commonly known as Bishops) is a private, English medium, boarding and day high school for boys situated in the suburb of Rondebosch in Cape Town in the Western Cape province of South Africa. The school was established on ...

, where he was Head Boy in 1991. Shuttleworth obtained a Bachelor of Business Science degree in Finance and

Information Systems An information system (IS) is a formal, sociotechnical, organizational system designed to collect, process, store, and distribute information. From a sociotechnical perspective, information systems are composed by four components: task, people ...

at the

University of Cape Town The University of Cape Town (UCT) ( af, Universiteit van Kaapstad, xh, Yunibesithi ya yaseKapa) is a public research university in Cape Town, South Africa. Established in 1829 as the South African College, it was granted full university statu ...

. As a student, he became involved in the installation of the first residential Internet connections at the university.

Work

In 1995, Shuttleworth founded Thawte Consulting, a company which specialized in

digital certificate In cryptography, a public key certificate, also known as a digital certificate or identity certificate, is an electronic document used to prove the validity of a public key. The certificate includes information about the key, information about the ...

s and

Internet security Internet security is a branch of computer security. It encompasses the Internet, browser security, web site security, and network security as it applies to other applications or operating systems as a whole. Its objective is to establish rules ...

. In December 1999, Shuttleworth sold Thawte to

VeriSign Verisign Inc. is an American company based in Reston, Virginia, United States that operates a diverse array of network infrastructure, including two of the Internet's thirteen root nameservers, the authoritative registry for the , , and gene ...

, earning Shuttleworth R3.5 billion ( million, equivalent to $ million in ). In September 2000, Shuttleworth formed HBD Venture Capital (''Here be Dragons''), a

business incubator Business incubator is an organization that helps startup companies and individual entrepreneurs to develop their businesses by providing a fullscale range of services starting with management training and office space and ending with venture c ...

and

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to start-up company, startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth poten ...

provider now managed by Knife Capital. In March 2004 he formed Canonical Ltd., for the promotion and commercial support of

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

projects, especially the

operating system. In December 2009, Shuttleworth stepped down as the CEO of Canonical Ltd,

Jane Silber Jane Silber is a board member of Canonical Ltd. and was its Chief Executive Officer from 2010 to 2017. Silber is also the chair of the board of The Sensible Code Company (whose products include QuickCode.) and Diffblue (whose products include C ...

took Canonical CEO position. Shuttleworth resumed the position of CEO of Canonical in July 2017 at the end of Silber's tenure.

Linux and FOSS

In the 1990s, Shuttleworth participated as one of the developers of the Debian

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...

. In 2001, he formed the

Shuttleworth Foundation The Shuttleworth Foundation was established in January 2001 by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth as an experiment with the purpose of providing funding for people engaged in social change. While there have been various iterations of ...

, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to social innovation which also funds educational, free, and

open source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open ...

projects in South Africa, such as the

Freedom Toaster A Freedom Toaster is a public kiosk that will burn copies of free software onto user-provided CDs and DVDs. History The original Freedom Toaster project was sponsored by Mark Shuttleworth's Shuttleworth Foundation and built in Perl by Hamish ...

. In 2004, he returned to the free-software world by funding the development of

, a Linux distribution based on Debian, through his company, Canonical Ltd. 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 The idiom tongue-in-cheek refers to a humorous or sarcastic statement expressed in a serious manner. History The phrase originally expressed contempt, but by 1842 had acquired its modern meaning. Early users of the phrase include Sir Walter Scot ...

title "Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life" (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 Antarctica () is Earth's southernmost and least-populated continent. Situated almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle and surrounded by the Southern Ocean, it contains the geographic South Pole. Antarctica is the fifth-largest cont ...

aboard the

icebreaker An icebreaker is a special-purpose ship or boat designed to move and navigate through ice-covered waters, and provide safe waterways for other boats and ships. Although the term usually refers to ice-breaking ships, it may also refer to smaller ...

'' Kapitan Khlebnikov'' in early 2004. In September 2005, he purchased a 65% stake of Impi Linux. On 15 October 2006, it was announced that Mark Shuttleworth had become the first patron of KDE, the highest level of

sponsorship Sponsoring something (or someone) is the act of supporting an event, activity, person, or organization financially or through the provision of products or services. The individual or group that provides the support, similar to a benefactor, is k ...

available. This relationship 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.

, 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 The Open University (OU) is a British public research university and the largest university in the United Kingdom by number of students. The majority of the OU's undergraduate students are based in the United Kingdom and principally study off- ...

for this work. On 9 November 2012, Shuttleworth and

Kenneth Rogoff Kenneth Saul Rogoff (born March 22, 1953) is an American economist and chess Grandmaster. He is the Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy and professor of economics at Harvard University. Early life Rogoff grew up in Rochester, New York. ...

took part in a

debate Debate is a process that involves formal discourse on a particular topic, often including a moderator and audience. In a debate, arguments are put forward for often opposing viewpoints. Debates have historically occurred in public meetings, a ...

opposite

Garry Kasparov Garry Kimovich Kasparov (born 13 April 1963) is a Russian chess grandmaster, former World Chess Champion, writer, political activist and commentator. His peak rating of 2851, achieved in 1999, was the highest recorded until being surpassed by ...

and

Peter Thiel Peter Andreas Thiel (; born 11 October 1967) is a German-American billionaire entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in F ...

at the

Oxford Union The Oxford Union Society, commonly referred to simply as the Oxford Union, is a debating society in the city of Oxford England, whose membership is drawn primarily from the University of Oxford. Founded in 1823, it is one of Britain's oldest ...

, entitled "The Innovation Enigma". On 25 October 2013, Shuttleworth and Ubuntu were awarded the Austrian anti-privacy '' Big Brother Award'' for sending local Ubuntu Unity Dash searches to Canonical servers by default. A year earlier, in 2012, Shuttleworth had defended the anonymisation method used. He later reversed the decision, and no current Ubuntu version does this.

Spaceflight

Shuttleworth gained worldwide fame on 25 April 2002, as the second self-funded space tourist and the first South African in space. Flying through

Space Adventures Space Adventures, Inc. is an American space tourism company founded in 1998 by Eric C. Anderson. Its offerings include zero-gravity atmospheric flights, orbital spaceflights (with the option to participate in a spacewalk), and other spacefl ...

, he launched aboard the Russian Soyuz TM-34 mission as a

spaceflight participant Spaceflight participant (russian: участник космического полета, translit=uchastnik kosmicheskogo polyota) is the term used by NASA, Roscosmos, and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for people who travel into space, ...

, paying approximately US$20 million for the voyage (equivalent to $ million in ) Two days later, the Soyuz spacecraft arrived at the

International Space Station The International Space Station (ISS) is the largest modular space station currently in low Earth orbit. It is a multinational collaborative project involving five participating space agencies: NASA (United States), Roscosmos (Russia), JAXA ( ...

, where he spent eight days participating in experiments related to AIDS and

genome In the fields of molecular biology and genetics, a genome is all the genetic information of an organism. It consists of nucleotide sequences of DNA (or RNA in RNA viruses). The nuclear genome includes protein-coding genes and non-coding g ...

research. On 5 May 2002, he returned to Earth on Soyuz TM-33. In order to participate in the flight, Shuttleworth had to undergo one year of training and preparation, including seven months spent in Star City, Russia. When he was in space, he spoke to

Thabo Mbeki Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki KStJ (; born 18 June 1942) is a South African politician who was the second president of South Africa from 14 June 1999 to 24 September 2008, when he resigned at the request of his party, the African National Congress (ANC ...

, then president of South Africa, on video link as part of the Freedom Day celebrations to mark the end of

apartheid Apartheid (, especially South African English: , ; , "aparthood") was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia) from 1948 to the early 1990s. Apartheid was ...

. He also had a radio conversation with Nelson Mandela and a 14-year-old South African girl, Michelle Foster, who asked him to marry her. He politely dodged the question, stating that he was "very honoured at the question" before changing the subject.Space.com
Nelson Mandela Chats with Shuttleworth
2 May 2002. The terminally ill Foster was provided the opportunity to have a conversation with Mark Shuttleworth and Nelson Mandela by the Reach for a Dream foundation.

Transport

He has a private jet, a

Bombardier Global Express The Bombardier Global Express is a large cabin, 6,000 nmi / 11,100 km range business jet designed and manufactured by Bombardier Aviation (formerly Bombardier Aerospace). Announced in October 1991, it first flew on 13 October 1996, receiv ...

, which is often referred to as ''Canonical One'' 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.

Legal clash with the South African Reserve Bank

Upon moving R2.5 billion in capital from South Africa to the

, the South African Reserve Bank imposed a R250 million levy in order to release his assets. Shuttleworth appealed and, after a lengthy legal battle, on 18 June 2015 the Constitutional Court of South Africa reversed and set aside the findings of the lower courts, ruling that the dominant purpose of an exit charge was to regulate conduct rather than to raise revenue. The court held "...that the exit charge was not inconsistent with the Constitution. The dominant purpose of the exit charge was not to raise revenue but rather to regulate conduct by discouraging the export of capital to protect the domestic economy."

Notes

References

External links

Mark Shuttleworth's homepage

{{DEFAULTSORT:Shuttleworth, Mark 1973 births Alumni of Diocesan College, Cape Town British astronauts British bloggers British chief executives British software engineers Canonical (company) Cypherpunks Debian people Living people Open source people People from Welkom South African astronauts South African chief executives South African engineers South African inventors South African people of British descent Space tourists Ubuntu (operating system) people University of Cape Town alumni White South African people