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A frontier spirit
If billionaire cosmonaut and philanthropist Mark Shuttleworth has his way, free internet technology will revolutionise the innovation platform on, and rate at, which knowledge is created and transferred across the globe. But there's a sting in the tail.
He's probably best known for space travel. More accurately, he's admired as the first African cosmonaut to travel to space on a commercial ticket after cashing in an internet consulting company he founded as a final year university student. He's the legendary free spirit who sold Thawte, a company that became the first to produce a full-security encrypted e-commerce web server that was commercially available outside the United States, to US company VeriSign for a hefty sum that made him an instant billionaire, went on to found HBD Venture Capital and The Shuttleworth Foundation — and then triumphantly watched it slowly change the landscape of the internet.
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