Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu creator, motivates students at the Isle of Man College

Yesterday was a very special day indeed (29th of March 2012). Mark Shuttleworth, creator of the Linux based Ubuntu operating system, gave a 1 hour presentation of his life to students at the Isle of Man College.
It was a whistle stop tour of his life from the time he sold his first business to Verisign, to making reality his ambition to become a space tourist! Finally, he spoke about how he created and manages the Ubuntu project. This guy is a real motivator and we have been fortunate to have had the presentation recorded for future training needs.

For the open-source community there is also a lot to learn regarding his vision for the future of software developments, particularly his current project that will provide 'easy to deploy', open-source cloud solutions. In an earlier blog, I wrote about private versus public Clouds and the likely requirement for more private versions as security risks mount. I'm not certain how the new software will fit into the private/public cloud debate, but I look forward to finding out shortly.

Many thanks to Mark for his motivational talk to our Manx students on the BA Computer Science programme and to those students that'll be taking the programme in following years. The presentation recording will be used for training and facilitating learning among our students for years to come; after all, it's good to be motivated by someone who has done it their way, and for the right reasons (that is, open-source creativity). Mark's passion for the open-source movement was strongly evident in his presentation, hopefully, it'll be infectious among our learners also.

Could you be our next motivational speaker or know of someone who could be? Please contact myself (alastair.robertson@iomcollege.ac.im) or Roger Cowin (roger.cowin@iomcollege.ac.im). The college provides various degrees (BSc Health and Social Care, BSc Computer Science, BA Business Studies and the MBA) whose students would always benefit from seeing practitioners speak about their experiences.

A special thanks to Manx TV (Paul Moulton) for recording the event. The follow-up interviews with Mark can be seen here and here.