Mark Shuttleworth and OLPC

Mark Shuttleworth recently gave an interview to the Austrian site derStandard. For those who don’t know him, Mark Shuttleworth is a South African millionaire who funds Ubuntu, one of the most popular linux distributions.

In 1999, Shuttleworth shot to fame (he was 26) after selling his company Thawte to the giant Verisign for 525 million dollars. In 2002 he paid for his ticket aboard a Soyuz spacecraft, becoming the second space tourist. Then he decided it would be good to share part of his fortune with the rest of us and created the Ubuntu Foundation, with an initial capital of 10 million dollars.

In that interview Shuttleworth gives his opinion on the OLPC project:

derStandard.at: What’s your take on the One Laptop per Child-project?

Mark Shuttleworth: I think it’s a really beautiful project and I’m very supportive of the work, they are doing some great innovations in there. I expect that some of the countries that will go down that road will choose Ubuntu and if they do that, we would help them to make Ubuntu work very well on that platform. At this stage obviously everyone is waiting to see how it will pan out, my own sensing is, that it’s already a triumphant success in terms of shaking up the industry and getting the industry to think about both new technologies and new markets. But I fear that people may judge it harshly if they don’t actually produce the laptop for a 100 Dollars and unfortunately it looks like that is unlikely at this stage.