Storage Pavillion at Cloud Expo

Cloud Computing - Canonical founder, sugar daddy and CEO Mark Shuttleworth will be stepping down in March to let his number two COO Jane Silber have a go at running the joint, giving it a more commercial focus, maybe even making it profitable.

Canonical will hire a COO to replace Silber as well as someone to replace her as head of the company's Ubuntu One cloud storage service.

Shuttleworth means to stick around and focus on product design, partnerships and customers.

"Those are the areas that I enjoy most and also the areas where I can best shape the impact we have on open source and the technology market," he said. "I've become very passionate about design and quality, and want to spend more time figuring out how we harness the collaborative process to build better, more insightful products," he writes on his blog. "I can't think of a more interesting challenge, and luckily I couldn't think of a better person to take over my formal management and leadership responsibilities at Canonical than Jane....As a former VP at General Dynamics, Jane has more experience of large customers and large organizational leadership, which I see as essential for Canonical over the next five years. We are being welcomed as a partner and supplier to ever-larger businesses, and I want to make sure we are a robust answer to their needs."

On a joint blog with Silber, Shuttleworth said, "This change will have no bearing on my role on the Ubuntu Community Council and the Ubuntu Technical Board. We will continue to expand the Ubuntu governance structures as the project and Ubuntu community grow but I am not moving away or relinquishing any community role I hold."

To which Silber added, "One thing this move will bring about is a clearer separation of the role of CEO of Canonical and the leader of the Ubuntu community. It will be two different people now, which I think will be helpful in both achieving their joint and individual goals more quickly."