SA’s Mark Shuttleworth has decided to step down as CEO of Canonical, the corporate sponsor of the Ubuntu Linux operating system. Shuttleworth says in a post on his blog, published on Thursday, that chief operating officer Jane Silber will take over as CEO from March.

Shuttleworth says he will continue to be actively involved with Ubuntu, but will focus more of his energy on product design, partnerships and customers. “Those are the areas I enjoy most and also the areas where I can best shape the impact we have on open source and the technology market,” he says.

“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,” Shuttleworth adds.

“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. We’ve worked together long enough, and closely enough, that I can be confident of continuity in the pieces I most care about and also excited about the ways in which I think Jane will raise the bar for the senior team.

“As a former vice-president at General Dynamics, Jane has more experience of large customers and large organisational 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.

Shuttleworth says Canoncial will hire a new chief operating officer and a new lead for Ubuntu One, the company’s cloud-based services offering whose development Silber has overseen directly. “There’s no rush, so we plan to coordinate things carefully and I expect I’ll be focused on my new role by March.

Since Jane joined the company, she and I have shared the load of coordinating between the leaders of all the key teams that make up Canonical. We’ve been through various permutations as new initiatives needed different kinds of attention; Jane currently leads the Ubuntu One effort, for example. — Staff reporter, TechCentral