Spaceman Bounties

Mark Shuttleworth really is one of the good guys with both great vision and ability to make things happen. Of course, he can afford to be a good guy - anyone who can afford to be one of the world's first space tourists is certainly not short of cash! The Shuttleworth Foundation that Mark has founded has some great aims, a lot of which is focused to South Africa (that being his country of birth). The belief that Africa in general can be aided by improving the education system so that they have many bright, talented people showing their full potential seems like a reasonable idea to me. Of course, one of the main reasons that I've found out about Mark is because of the good things that he is doing in the Free Open Source Software community. Mark is funding a number of projects such as Ubuntu Linux and the SchoolTool project. Naturally a lot of the projects that Mark funds are related to the aims of the Shuttleworth Foundation and it's just good to see someone helping to fund projects in the FOSS community. Another thing I noticed when browsing the Ubuntu website were that anyone can get "bounties" for implementing certain features. There are a few open source type projects that are now offering bounties for this sort of thing. If only I could make enough money from those things to make a living out of it! I'd really love to work full time on free/open source software...