computer science

Mark Shuttleworth

Mark Shuttleworth is a computer science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Mark Shuttleworth rather than just read about it. In short: Mark Richard Shuttleworth (born 18 September 1973) is a South African and British entrepreneur, founder and CEO of Canonical, the company behind the Linux operating system variant Ubuntu. In 2002, Shuttleworth became the first African to travel to space, doing so as a space tourist.

Key takeaways

Mark Shuttleworth belongs to computer science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Mark Shuttleworth to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Mark Shuttleworth from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Mark Richard Shuttleworth (born 18 September 1973) is a South African and British entrepreneur, founder and CEO of Canonical, the company behind the Linux operating system variant Ubuntu. In 2002, Shuttleworth became the first African to travel to space, doing so as a space tourist. He holds dual citizenship from South Africa and the United Kingdom. In 2020, the Sunday Times Rich List estimated Shuttleworth's net worth to be £500 million.

Early life Shuttleworth was born in Welkom, Free State, South Africa, to a surgeon and a nursery-school teacher. He attended Western Province Preparatory School (where he became Head Boy in 1986), followed by one term at Rondebosch Boys' High School, and then Bishops/Diocesan College where he was Head Boy in 1991. Shuttleworth obtained a Bachelor of Business Science degree in Finance and Information Systems at the University of Cape Town. As a student, he was involved in the installation of the university's first residential Internet connections. Since childhood, Mark Shuttleworth had a dream of becoming a cosmonaut and flying into space.

Work In 1995, Shuttleworth founded Thawte Consulting, a company specializing in digital certificates and Internet security. According to The Official Ubuntu Book, Thawte became the second-largest certificate authority after VeriSign. Shuttleworth sold Thawte to VeriSign in December 1999, earning him R3.5 billion (US$575 million, equivalent to $1015 million in 2024). In September 2000, Shuttleworth formed HBD Venture Capital (Here be Dragons), a business incubator and venture capital provider, now managed by Knife Capital. In March 2004 he formed Canonical Ltd., to promote and commercially support free software projects, especially the Ubuntu operating system. In December 2009, Shuttleworth stepped down as CEO of Canonical Ltd. to focus on "product design, partnerships, and customers", with COO Jane Silber succeeding him. Shuttleworth returned to the position of CEO of Canonical in July 2017, with Silber moving to Canonical's board of directors.

Linux and FOSS

In the 1990s, Shuttleworth participated as a developer of the Debian operating system. According to the Official Ubuntu Book, he was the first to upload the Apache HTTP Server "into the Debian project's archives". In 2001, he formed the Shuttleworth Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to social innovation and funding educational, free, and open source software projects in South Africa, such as the Freedom Toaster. In 2004, he returned to the free-software world by funding the development of Ubuntu, a Linux distribution based on Debian, through his company, Canonical Ltd. In 2005, he founded the Ubuntu Foundation and made an initial investment of US$10 million. In the Ubuntu project, Shuttleworth is often referred to with the tongue-in-cheek title "Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life" (SABDFL). While travelling to Antarctica aboard the icebreaker Kapitan Khlebnikov in early 2004, Shuttleworth took six months of Debian mailing list archives with him to compile a list of potential hires for the project. In September 2005, he purchased a 65% stake of Impi Linux. On 15 October 2006, Mark Shuttleworth became the first patron of KDE, the highest level of commercial sponsorship available. This relationship and financial support for Kubuntu (an Ubuntu variant using KDE as the main desktop) ended in 2012. Canonical is a patron of KDE since 2016. On 17 December 2009, Shuttleworth announced that, effective March 2010, he would step down as CEO of Canonical to focus on product design, partnerships, and customers. Jane Silber, COO since 2004, succeeded him as CEO. In September 2010, he received an honorary degree from the Open University for this work. On 9 November 2012, Shuttleworth and Kenneth Rogoff debated with Garry Kasparov and Peter Thiel at the Oxford Union in a debate entitled "The Innovation Enigma". On 25 October 2013, Shuttleworth and Ubuntu received the Austrian anti-privacy Big Brother Award for sending local Ubuntu Unity Dash searches to Canonical servers by default. In 2012, Shuttleworth had defended the anonymisation method used. He later reversed the decision; this feature is absent in current Ubuntu versions.

Spaceflight

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Mark Shuttleworth

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Mark Shuttleworth claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In computer science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Mark Shuttleworth before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Mark Shuttleworth ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Mark Shuttleworth

In research: Mark Shuttleworth appears in computer science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Mark Shuttleworth in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Mark Shuttleworth is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1973 births, Alumni of Diocesan College, Cape Town, British astronauts, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Mark Shuttleworth outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Mark Shuttleworth in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Mark Shuttleworth means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Mark Shuttleworth out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Mark Shuttleworth in simple terms?

Why does Mark Shuttleworth matter?

Because it connects several computer science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Mark Shuttleworth?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Mark Shuttleworth.