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Ubuntu Linux 10.04 LTS is a major release of the operating system Mark Shuttleworth and his company Canonical first released in 2004. In this interview with Simon Dingle Shuttleworth discusses the significance of the latest version of Ubuntu Linux, competitor operating systems, the move to cloud services, open source advocacy and how it has changed in recent years, application distribution, social networking, smartphones and other topics.

Shuttleworth is a South African philanthropist and internet entrepreneur who started the company Thawte in 1995 and went on to sell it to Verisign at the turn of the century in a US$575 million deal. He then became the second ever self-funded civilian astronaut traveling to the international space station as a member of the Soyuz TM-34/TM-33 missions. Upon his return to earth Mark formed the Shuttleworth Foundation and Canonical.

Simon Dingle recently authored a chapter on Mark Shuttleworth for the book South Africa’s Greatest Entrepreneurs. The publication will be available in September 2010.

Use the audio player above to stream the interview or click here to download the mp3 file.

On the eve of the World Cup 2010 kickoff in South Africa Leo Laporte and I discussed technology at the tournament and how South Africa has been upgraded for the biggest event in human history. We talked about 3D television, stadium bandwidth, Google StreetView, social media and gigapixel image technology, amongst other things. Check out the video above for our full discussion.

Today is Facebook Suicide Day. What I suspect is a very small group of Facebook users plan to delete their accounts along with all their personal information residing on the social networking service. The reason they’re doing this is due to Facebook’s shifting privacy policies and what seems to be a personal problem with the company’s young CEO Mark Zuckerberg. I won’t be deleting anything today except a few press releases in my inbox. But that doesn’t mean I approve of Facebook’s user privacy policies either. (more…)

It wasn’t long ago that Apple and Google were allied against Microsoft and the broader market. The marriage of the two Silicon Valley giants was torn asunder by Google’s ingression in the mobile market with Android. The former confederates went their separate ways with Google CEO Eric Schmidt leaving the Apple board. Now it’s on like Donkey Kong between the three tech behemoths – and cloud computing is a new frontier in the ongoing war.

In the enterprise space cloud is less remarkable than its most vehement proponents would have you believe. The IBMs and Microsofts of the world have established metrics, case studies and methodologies for how it’s done. And, as IBM CEO Sam Palmisano said in a meeting with press at Armonk, New York Yesterday – this cloud stuff is “nothing new”. He’s seen it all before. In the consumer space things are different, however, and here I include small business.
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