A portrait of Ubuntu's free software rocket man, Mark Shuttleworth

Forbes yesterday published a refreshing piece on Really Free Software and its newest rock star, Mark Shuttleworth. Mark is definitely an interesting guy, having both pocketed about $700 million from the first Internet boom by selling digital certificate company Thawte to Verisign and then using about $20 million to hitch a ride to the International Space Station. But lest you believe that he is your run-of-the-mill dot com playboy, he has already invested $15 million into Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, expects to invest another $15 million before he knows whether it will be profitable, and has put another $10 million into the Ubuntu Foundation to support his vision into the future.

What has he gotten for his investments? Four million happy Linux users being supported in 22 languages, many of them desktop users. And more importantly, he has created a development community that actually cares about the end user experience on Linux. It's too early to tell yet, but Mark's investment of about $40 million may actually overcome the traditional "chicken and egg" problem of new platforms. With four million users, it's worthwhile for a person or company to develop a package or service to sell to those users. And the more packages (there are already about 16,000) and services, the more users who will adopt it.

In the first Internet boom, I used to keep an eye on whatever Jim Clark was doing. Jim, whom I met in 1994, as responsible for putting Silicon Graphics, Netscape, Healtheon, myCFO, and Neotris on the map because he had the vision, the money, and the connections to make new things happen. Mark Shuttleworth may be the new 21st century Jim Clark. And the fact he's not one of the California VC gang (Mark hails from South Africa) may break the media myth that all good technology comes from Silicon Valley. And you know what? It's about time.

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