Mark was born and raised in South Africa, and studied finance and information technology at the University of Cape Town. He went on to found Thawte, a company specialising in digital certificates and internet privacy, developed using Open Source software. He sold Thawte to the American company VeriSign in 1999, and founded HBD Venture Capital and The Shuttleworth Foundation. In April 2002 Mark became the first African in space, as a cosmonaut member of the crew of Soyuz mission TM34 to the International Space Station. Mark maintains that 'If we are to lift Africa from her current circumstances, we will need a generation of learners that are gifted with curiosity about the world in which they live, and the tools to understand and shape that world'. With this in mind he and his Foundation have invested in projects such as TuxLabs, HIP2B2, The School Tool Project (to develop a common global school administration infrastructure that is freely available under an Open Source licence)and The Ubuntu Project, a community project with participation from many volunteers, sponsored by Canonical Ltd.
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