The Grill: Ubuntu Linux's Mark Shuttleworth in the Hot Seat
Mark Shuttleworth made news in 2002 when he fulfilled a lifelong ambition and became the first South African to travel into space, paying $20 million to be a civilian cosmonaut on an eight-day flight aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. In 2004, he founded Ubuntu Linux to bring the operating system to people around the world.
You have pumped more than $10 million of your own money into the continuing development of Ubuntu Linux, and you have been on a personal campaign to bring a free, easy-to-use and reliable Linux to the masses around the world. Why?
In college, I was struggling to get my own personal computer hooked up to the university network. Then someone gave me a stack of Slackware Linux discs, and [I] found myself just enthralled by the breadth and depth of the tools that were available from Linux, even in those very early days. It’s like going from living in the desert to walking into an all-you-can-eat buffet. I went on to turn that interest in the Internet into a small business called Thawte [in 1995], which sold digital certificates that I created, initially at least, with cryptographic software that was available under an open-source license.
How did you think of getting into such a business back in 1995, just as the Internet was becoming a household word?
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Virtualization
He says Virtualization is a major thing. This kinda tells me Ubuntu is going to start focusing more on Server level then desktop. A Majority of new Linux desktop users are going to either not want to play with virtualization or have a hard time with it. Also it's not a true fix to any Desktop problem but only a bandaid. The main function of virtualization would be for servers. That's kinda a bummer. Instead of investing in something like Loki did porting games to Linux or helping to create more polishes business desktop applications he's focusing on virtualization. Doesn't seem to practical for Desktop use. When will someone actually focus just on the Desktop and not sway to server.
re: Virtualization
Isn't that PCLINUXOS's modus operandi?