Andy Potts

AS HE lays out his vision for the future of open-source software, Mark Shuttleworth is enthusiastic, but he looks tired. He has been up late negotiating yet another deal as part of his mission to bring open source to a wider audience. A successful South African entrepreneur during the dotcom era, he wants open-source zealots to lose their religion and concentrate on ease-of-use instead. And he is putting his money where his mouth is. Since 2004, he has been using his fortune to fund the Ubuntu project, which makes a user-friendly version of Linux, the open-source operating system. Ubuntu is a Zulu and Xhosa term that roughly means “universal bond of sharing between humans”. Ubuntu's slogan is “Linux for human beings”, and it is aimed at mainstream computer users. For although Linux is popular on servers, it is not, so far, used on many desktops.

In part that is because open-source software tends to polarise opinion. It has vociferous critics who suspect that software written by idealistic nerds, and made available free to anyone who wants to download it, must be some kind of communist plot. Zealous believers, meanwhile, long for open source to triumph over the evil empires of commercial software. This clash is often depicted as an epic struggle for supremacy between Linux and Microsoft's proprietary Windows operating system. But the truth is that most computer users do not know or care about the politics of open-source software. Mr Shuttleworth says most people simply want to read their e-mail, browse the web and so on.

“It's very easy to declare victory,” says Mr Shuttleworth, describing the smug attitude of some open-source supporters. “There are big chunks of the software world that depend on free software.” But Ubuntu's aim is not to conquer the software establishment and replace its products. Rather than seeing open-source software as one of two competing ideologies and focusing on the struggle, Ubuntu thinks about the user. Ubuntu is a complete bundle of software, from operating system to applications and programming tools, that is updated every six months and, says Mr Shuttleworth, will always be free. Taking the hassle out of open source is intended to move adoption beyond politically motivated enthusiasts and encourage mass adoption of the software on its merits.

It is a bold scheme, but Mr Shuttleworth is not a man to think small. He was raised in a suburb of Cape Town, an unlikely place from which to join the internet revolution. Yet that was his goal from the day he first used a web browser. When he saw that the internet was switching from a text-based to a graphical medium, “I sensed that everything was going to change,” he says. He spent a couple of years looking for the right way to get involved, given his situation. “I had to find something to do that was cutting-edge, without requiring much bandwidth or venture capital,” he says. He succeeded handsomely by setting up a company, Thawte, that made digital certificates and security software to support internet commerce. He sold the firm for over $500m to VeriSign in 1999, near the peak of the dotcom boom.

The dream of a space cadet?

In his home country Mr Shuttleworth is most famous for what he did next: he became the first African in space, and the world's second space tourist, in 2002. This involved a gruelling eight-month training regime in Russia's Star City, so that Mr Shuttleworth could accompany cosmonauts on a Soyuz mission to the International Space Station. “Because of the changes that were happening in Russia there was a unique opportunity in changing the way people think about space,” he says. This change is still under way, he says, and the growth of space tourism means that in the coming years, “we'll all have members of our family who will have been there and had their thinking changed by that experience.”

Mr Shuttleworth believes that open-source software can bring about a similar change in the way people think about computers. To achieve this goal he is relying on business acumen, rather than on the quasi-religious faith that permeates much of the open-source movement. Dell, a big PC-maker, said in May that it would start offering Ubuntu on some of its desktop and laptop products in America. Michael Dell, the company's founder, who recently took over again as its chief executive, even runs Ubuntu on his own laptop. Dell's customers said they wanted to be able to buy PCs with Linux installed, and the company chose Ubuntu—a coup for Mr Shuttleworth.

The deal will do more than simply put Ubuntu on more computers. It will also help to make Canonical, the company Mr Shuttleworth set up to manage Ubuntu, self-sustaining. Canonical has around 80 full-time programmers, although the project also relies on hundreds of volunteers. “Producing Ubuntu does not require a huge amount of money. I could keep funding it for a very, very long time,” he says. “But I'd like to break even, so we're building up a set of revenue models that don't require licensing or advertising.” Dell will not pay to include Ubuntu on its machines, but Canonical will offer buyers training and support on a commercial basis, which will help to fund the project.

Open-source innovation

Ultimately, though, Mr Shuttleworth's ambitions stretch far beyond just providing the world with a cheap and friendly operating system. “The accusation of proprietary providers is that free software is just copying what's been done before, rather than innovating,” he says. “I don't believe that. The collaborative approach of the open-source community is the richest model for stimulating innovation.” In some areas, he insists, open-source software is not seeking to catch up, because it is in the lead.

One is localisation, or the translation of software into foreign languages. This can take open-source software into parts of the world where it makes little immediate commercial sense to go. “There are some 350 languages in the world with more than a million speakers,” says Mr Shuttleworth. “Free software is only translated in a significant way into about 20 of those, although this is already a lot greater penetration than proprietary software.” With a huge group of volunteer translators to draw upon, open-source programmers ought to be able to make software in other languages far more widely available.

“My hope is not just that we can achieve parity with the proprietary world, but that we can leapfrog it.”

Portable devices such as phones, cameras, GPS units and music-players are another area of opportunity for open-source software. Many such devices are already powered by Linux and other free software, and their numbers are growing. Around 80m smartphones were sold last year, up 20% from 2005, and Linux is the fastest-growing operating system in the field. “My hope is not just that we can achieve parity with the proprietary world, but that we can leapfrog it,” says Mr Shuttleworth. “Things that should be easy will become so. I shouldn't have to synchronise my cellphone with my PC when in Bluetooth range—it should just happen.” And this will happen most easily, he believes, when free software is running on both PCs and hand-held gadgets.

But Mr Shuttleworth is most excited about free software's potential to open up the third dimension in the display and navigation of information. “In the space station there was no sensation of up or down,” he recalls. “Yet if it was even slightly obvious which direction Earth was, everyone would point their feet in that direction. Our brain cannot reconfigure itself in a rational way. So we should exploit the irrationality to be productive.”

One area where he sees this happening is in real-time collaboration. E-mail is widely used as a collaborative tool, but has severe limitations. When a team, such as a group of software developers, wants to work together on something in real time, something more elaborate is needed. Mr Shuttleworth points to an open-source platform called Croquet, an immersive environment that is similar in many ways to Second Life, a popular online virtual world. “You can see your collaborators' avatars looking at a spreadsheet in a virtual room,” he says. “People change things in different colours—newer stuff glows. We've started to use this for planning and building Ubuntu.”

Canonical, which is based in London where Mr Shuttleworth now lives, cannot afford to pay for all its programmers to come to planning meetings for new versions of the software, which are held every six months. Rather than demote some participants to a “second class” of virtual participation, he would prefer to have everyone participate virtually.

Although it may be ahead of proprietary software on some fronts, open-source software lags behind in many areas too, Mr Shuttleworth admits. “The community tends to build for functionality, not for comfort,” he complains. “We have to inspire the free-software world to make the user environment attractive. This takes an order of magnitude more work.” He is also scathing about the incompatibilities that exist between so many open-source projects. Consistent packaging, so that open-source products work across as many platforms as possible, is desperately needed. “Free software doesn't have to compete as commercial vendors do,” he says, “so we shouldn't create artificial barriers where none need exist.” Further confusion arises from the multiplicity of open-source software licences, each with their own set of rules. “This hampers innovation by making it hard to know whether two pieces of software may be used together,” he says.

Despite these problems, Mr Shuttleworth is confident that open-source software can help to make computing and internet access more widely available. He is driven by a desire for greater digital inclusiveness, rather than knee-jerk anti-commercialism. “To me, open source is about making sure that everyone has access to the next wave of thinking,” he says. In 2001 he set up the Shuttleworth Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to educational and open-source projects in South Africa. It has launched innovative projects such as the Freedom Toaster, a machine for copying free software onto CDs in remote regions, where lack of bandwidth makes downloading software impractical.

For Mr Shuttleworth, innovation often comes in two waves. During the web's first wave, much effort was expended trying to transfer traditional thinking about information to the new medium. “For example, the web was organised through a large number of directories, until we realised this didn't make sense as a way to organise information,” he says. But the rise of search engines, the web's second wave, made it possible to search for information using keywords instead. Similarly, he believes, the first wave of open-source software has been about imitating what came before. The second wave, Mr Shuttleworth hopes, will turn the software world on its head.