Despite being on record as disliking public speaking, Mark Shuttleworth was in Dublin last month to give the keynote speech at this year's ApacheCon Europe. His theme was the future direction of open source software (OSS), and the issues developers should focus on to ensure the OSS movement’s continued success.

Shuttleworth sold his South African start-up company, Thawte Consulting, to Verisign in 1999 for $575m. He subsequently spent $20m becoming the first African in space. He embarked on cosmonaut training in Star City, Russia and Khazakstan - culminating in a flight to the International Space Station in April 2002.

In early 2004, Shuttleworth founded the Ubuntu project: a Linux flavour which has garnered much support in the tech community, leapfrogging other older and more established distributions to become one of the most popular Linux desktop choices of the past 12 months.

Full Story.