Technology hero I DON’T have many heroes, but Mark Shuttleworth, 37, is one of them.

http://www.manilastandardtoday.com/insideBusop.htm?f=2011/february/1/chi...

Technology hero
I DON’T have many heroes, but Mark Shuttleworth, 37, is one of them.

The founder of Ubuntu Linux won’t make it to the cover of Time Magazine as its Person of the Year anytime soon, but that takes nothing away from what he’s already accomplished.

For 2010, Time saw fit to give its award to another Mark for inventing Facebook, and has honored only two other personalities from the industry with the same title: Andy Grove of Intel in 1997 and Jeff Bezos of Amazon in 1999. Bill Gates, who has probably had the greatest impact on the way we use computers today, shared the award with his wife Melinda and rock star Bono in 2005, not for his contributions to technology but for his philanthropic work.

Time honored the inventor of Facebook last year “for connecting more than half a billion people” and “creating a new system of exchanging information and for changing how we live our lives”—yet never gave the same recognition to a real hero, Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web and gave it away to the world for free. Go figure.

Given that Time’s yardstick is the greatest impact on the largest number of people, it will probably never get around to Shuttleworth. The Ubuntu distribution of Linux that he’s funded is estimated to be used by “only” 12 million users today, still a drop in the bucket in a universe of more than 1 billion computers. In fact, most non-Ubuntu users have probably never even heard of Shuttleworth.

Born in South Africa on Sept. 18, 1973, Shuttleworth obtained a BS in Finance and Information Systems at the University of Cape Town. In 1995, he founded Thawte Consulting, a company that specialized in digital certificates and Internet security. Four years later, he sold the company to VeriSign for the equivalent of $575 million.

In 2002, he spent $20 million of that money to become the world’s second self-funded space tourist. Launched aboard the Russian Soyuz TM-34, cosmonaut Shuttleworth spent eight days on the International Space Station, participating in experiments related to AIDS and genome research.

To prepare for the flight, Shuttleworth had to undergo a year of training, including seven months in Star City, Russia, where the language, he said, was “a mixture of testosterone and ballet.”

“After the space trip, I felt that anything that I diverted time to should potentially have a global impact,” Shuttleworth told a forum in 2008, recalling how people he had met in Russia were trying to put more computers in schools and how kids in Cape Town were using Linux on their PCs.

This paved the way for the Ubuntu project in 2004, whose goal was to produce a high quality desktop and server operating system that is freely available all over the world. The corporate vehicle for sponsoring the project was Canonical Ltd., which would make money not by selling the operating system—which Shuttleworth says will always be free—but by providing commercial support and related services to corporate users.

A year later, he established the Ubuntu Foundation and made an initial investment of $10 million as “an emergency fund” to ensure that Ubuntu would be maintained, even without Canonical. The foundation remains dormant and Canonical continues to fund Ubuntu, even though the company has yet to turn a profit.

Since 2004, there have been 13 releases of Ubuntu, maintaining for the most part Shuttleworth’s target of a new version every six months. In that time, Ubuntu has become easier to use and more visually appealing, two attributes that were generally absent in early Linux distributions.

To me, Shuttleworth is a technology hero because he has used his considerable talent to help develop, maintain and popularize a Linux-based operating system that is second to none in terms of stability, security and ease of use, and made it available to everyone free of charge. I began using Ubuntu in 2006 and have never felt the need to go back to Windows, and today, the only thing I still use my Macbook for extensively is Keynote, Apple’s presentation software, which still blows away anything available on Linux today.

Shuttleworth is a hero, too, because he champions the cause of free and open source software but puts users ahead of dogma.

He also truly believes that the free and open source model is the most efficient way to develop software and seems determined to prove it.

“The collaborative approach of the open-source community is the richest model for stimulating innovation,” he told the Economist in 2007. Since then, he has pressed to make Ubuntu even more attractive than Mac OS X.

Today, he continues to push Ubuntu in new, user-focused directions that some longtime Ubuntu users see as risky. But then, Shuttleworth the former cosmonaut, has never been known to be risk-averse. The title of his blog, “Here be dragons,” is a phrase that recalls how sea serpents and other mythological creatures were drawn on medieval maps to denote dangerous or unexplored territories. On the software map, these are areas Shuttleworth is clearly willing to explore. Chin Wong

Column archives and blog at: http://www.chinwong.com