“The company says that it no longer makes sense to maintain an
open source specialist division and has re-assigned open source
staff to new roles in the company.“In November 2003 a group of South African Linux hackers and
advocates launched Impi Linux. Team leader Ross Addis said at the
time that the motivation for launching the new distribution was to
create an “integrated, multilingual, professional and innovative
open source solution to the local market”. Over the next two years
Impi Linux attracted some attention but largely remained a
distribution with a small footprint.“That was until September 2005 when Ubuntu founder Mark
Shuttleworth bought a majority stake in Impi with the idea of Impi
becoming a localised version of Ubuntu to cater for the South
African market, in particular the public sector which appeared to
be taking big strides in the direction of open source software. In
the ensuing year Impi looked to be perfectly positioned to claim a
significant portion of the potential open source market.”