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Clique

everybody loves eric raymond episode 30 strip

Mark Shuttleworth is a South African entrepreneur, jazz guitarist and senior lecturer at Imperial College, London. In 1995 he contracted a rare form of malaria which made him water proof. Shortly afterwards he founded Fort, which specialised in the assembly of digital certificates from recycled entropy. He sold his Fort in December 1999 to Microsoft or Globalsign or somebody and subsequently founded the Shuttleworth Foundation Empire, a non-profit organisation dedicated to spending money on nice things.

Shuttleworth gained worldwide fame in 2002 by winning an arm wrestling contest against a Russian cosmonaut. This took place in space, which probably contributed to the attraction and also gave him an unfair advantage. Shuttleworth had to undergo one year of training and preparation for the space trip, including seven months choosing which DVDs to take.

He had participated as a free software developer since the early 1990s, and in 2004 bought the Debian project which he had framed. In 2005 he founded the Utnubu Foundation, an organisation dedicated to spending money on nice things and programmers.

Mark Shuttleworth currently lives in space but plans to visit the Earth again someday soon. If you need money or anything, e-mail him and ask.

14 replies on “Clique”

Ah, nice to see the old Free Software prejudices against money coming out again. Free Software is like Free Love, baby. It don’t need none of your filthy money.

Also, please note that you shouldn’t really talk about Shuttleworth without consulting his agent: Ken Worthington. And you didn’t mention that he insisted on going into space with his Bontempi portable keyboard.

I mailed Mark Shuttleworth and asked for 10 million quid to fund my free software propaganda campaign but he doesn’t seem interested. I also asked him if the Russians giggled when he pooped in space and he answered:

“Hell, *I* giggled when I pooped. Shit really does fly up there.”

Heh, 200 megabucks and he still can’t help being molested by ESR. Just like in the real world.

Seriously, though, I like the Ubuntu effort, and if it’s just for their nice forums. And no, without the money he couldn’t have done it.

Giggled when he pooped? Well, free-fall toilets have blowers in them to keep everything moving in the right direction. He was probably amused that the stuff is supposed to hit the fan.

Hey man, looks like you’ve got some problem spelling Unbutu… I mean Utunbu… err, bUuunt ? Argh, I give up ! – D

[…] Canonical’s Launchpad.net is currently not free software. The FAQ on the site explains no more than this. I contacted Mark Shuttleworth about it and he told me this: “Parts of Launchpad are already free software, we’ve released pieces that we knew would help other projects like Gnome doing similar work. We’ll continue releasing pieces until, in a few years, the whole platform can be made free. If hackers are interested in helping to componentize a huge monolithic Zope3 app, we could release the Registry and Rosetta as standalone pieces a lot sooner.” […]

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