Shuttleworth named IT hero

[SpoOkie]

He made some software. sold it for MILLIONS, and now after he has so much money that he never has to do anything again. he supports open source.

 

[zamicro]

Congrats Mark!

 

[<moLe>]

Agree that I might have contradicted myself, point being that he already made Linux so accessible, that pretty soon it might become a mainstream alternative to osx or Windows. Which is cool, but this leads to a lot of people going "gosh u know I cant do this or that on Linux so it must be sh*t u know" thus just adding to the problem instead of contributing to the development (or even just input lest this person not being technically at the level of contributing. And yes, the ubuntu philosophy is an awesome philosophy, but then again Marc Shuttleworth didnt quite initiate that philosophy maby just gave it an apropriate name. Seeing that the Linux community as a whole have to be given credit for the leaps and strides that we saw thus far. What ubuntu basically did was take Debian and existing packages and give it an understandable interface for ex windows users.
But big up still to Marc for dedicating so much of his time to this, rare to see someone actually spending they're time on something as constructive as this after rolling in some big green.

 

[LazyLion]

He made some software. sold it for MILLIONS, and now after he has so much money that he never has to do anything again. he supports open source.

Dude? Are you serious?

1) He never said anywhere that he was not a capitalist.
2) He had to start somewhere
3) He grew into the Open Source Philosophy, he never had it from day one
4) He might have sold it to get the money needed to start supporting OSS.
5) He might have had a change of heart since then, that was a long time ago.
6) All of us who use OSS also still use proprietary software sometimes.

Your argument is plain stupid. That is like saying to an anti-drug advocate... but he is a hypocrite cos he used drugs years ago! Well, Duh???

 

[EtienneK]

He made some software. sold it for MILLIONS, and now after he has so much money that he never has to do anything again. he supports open source.

Yes and now he is spending MILLIONS on open source. He has spent more than $10million of his OWN money to build Ubuntu. And it's all 100% free, 100% open.

The day that you spend $10 000 001 of your money to better open source you can criticize him, but until then, STFU.

And to the other user who commented that Ubuntu is not user friendly, can you please provide an example?

 

[Nuxxy]

Free software (and by extension open source) has nothing to do with whether you charge money.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

To quote:

Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer.

Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

A program is free software if users have all of these freedoms.

Don't be a hater just coz you're skinflint.