Ubuntu Summit 2024 Canonical founder and CEO Mark Shuttleworth spoke to The Reg FOSS desk at Ubuntu Summit 2024 in The Hague about the Linux distribution's success, its missteps, his regrets, and what he'd tell his younger self. In 1999, Shuttleworth sold his South African digital certification authority, Thawte , to Verisign, which paid $575 million . That gave him the money to fund a project, originally under nonameyet.
com, to make a desktop flavor of Debian that was easy enough for non-technical people to use instead of Windows. The early years are described by Lionel Dricot in a blog post entitled 20 years of Linux on the Desktop . So, 20 years of Ubuntu.
How does it feel? Well, actually, I just feel grateful, because it's been 20 years of really interesting problems with really interesting people, so kept me mostly out of trouble. Are there any disappointments, any regrets so far, things that you hoped would work out and didn't? I think there'd be a kind of ennui if you knew the answers before you played the game, right? So the things that I feel I've come to understand because of those mistakes, I treasure. What do you consider the mistakes? For instance, the Ubuntu phone ? (For those who weren't watching in 2013, it didn't raise its Kickstarter funding .
) What do you consider the mistakes? So for me, the mistakes were first hesitating. In my mind, that kind of interaction was the way to go. I was 30-something – 30-low-something.
As it was taking off, there were some .