After selling Thawte, I imagine you had a world of opportunity in front of you. You could have lived in luxury for the rest of your life, multiplying your wealth. Instead, you decided to spend ten months in Russia training as an astronaut and became the first South African civilian in space. I read about it back then, and I remember thinking: my God, that sounds like a hell of a lot of hard work. Then, you decide to create the best GNU/Linux distribution—and again, you succeeded. What drives you towards such challenges, honestly?

Every time I go for a jog I end up huffing and puffing and thinking “hell, if I was a bit fitter, this would be easier”. But the reality is that if I were fitter, I would just want to run further or faster, and end up huffing and puffing anyway.

I think we are all driven to push ourselves in one way or another—to explore some idea or activity that’s interesting. And in each of the cases you describe, my main motivation was to find out what could be done.

With Ubuntu, it’s still too early to say we’ve been successful. My personal goal is to make the distro sustainable—then there will be a team that pays its own way and can focus on producing the best free software desktop on the planet without my interference!