Wired on Friday: What do computing millionaires do next? For many, a future free from financial worries leads to dreams of space travel. Every weekend the creator of hit PC games Doom and Quake, John Carmack, leaves his desk and hits the hangar to work on his space rocket start-up, Armadillo Aerospace.
Jeff Bezos, the man behind Amazon, has been working on a launch facility for his secret space transportation company, Blue Origin, and Microsoft's co-founder, Paul Allen, sponsored a vehicle, SpaceShipOne, that touched the edge of space last year.
But only one of the tech boom alumni has actually made it into orbit. South African Mark Shuttleworth remains the first tech entrepreneur to become a cosmonaut - via a Soyuz trip to the International Space Station. He paid the Russians a reported $20 million (€15.65 million) for the privilege. It's a short cut that his fellow aspiring astronaut millionaires might look down upon, but it worked.
Which prompts the question: what does Mr Shuttleworth, a 32-year old tycoon astronaut, do now he really has done it all?
Last year the entrepreneur began to approach software developers who were working on the Debian open source system. Would they like to join him, he said, on an ambitious, but secret new programming venture, one unconnected with space travel, almost identical to their current work, but which would pay a living, but not a handsome wage? If that seems a humble ambition, it's worth knowing more about Debian and its developers. Some programming projects are hard, and some are easy; some are coded for money, and some are coded for love.
The Debian project lives at the bravest end of that double extreme: hard work, and no money. Debian's 1,500 strong army of volunteer programmers and administrators have, for over a decade, set themselves the task of creating the perfect, free operating system.
In large part they have succeeded: Debian's current incarnation, based on the free Linux operating system, contains thousands of applications, from games to accounting software to microchip design to 3D computer animation. Any of these programmes can be installed on a correctly set-up Debian system with a single command.
For instance, the word processor I write this column with was installed for free by typing 'apt-get install openoffice.org' and Debian found and loaded the free Open Office word processor seamlessly.
No money is charged for using or downloading any part of Debian, nor are the 1,500 programmers who maintain the Debian system paid. The entire organisation is run on donations, some ingenious automation, and a fair degree of democratic bureaucracy.
It is a globally distributed labour of love. It could be said that Mr Shuttleworth's millions come from the other extreme of the chart: simple in concept and execution, but lucrative.
Unlike many dotcoms, the company that he founded in 1995 in his parents' garage had genuine value, but that value came less from the ingenuity of Mr Shuttleworth's products and more from a lucky accident of timing.
When you make a secure internet connection to, say, your bank, your web browser demands digitally-signed proof that your bank is who it says it is. Back in the web's early days, Shuttleworth persuaded the makers of the first browsers to accept certificates signed by his company, Thawte, as legitimate credentials for such websites.
At that moment his small firm joined established companies like Visa, RSA, and Verisign as the arbiters of web security. In effect, your browser trusted Mr Shuttleworth's signature more than it trusted your bank.
Shuttleworth took a stroke of luck, and nimbly spun a multi-million company from it. It was a beautiful move, and Thawte was snapped up by Verisign in 1999 for a cool $575 million.
Nimble and attractive are not terms that strangers often apply to Debian.
The necessities of synchronising the work of thousands of part-timers, and tens of thousands of separate coding projects, means that the co-ordinated release of a new "Debian stable" - the equivalent of the launch of Windows 2000 - are few and far between.
Debian users receive constant free updates for the programmes they use, but most new adapters are faced with an installation disk produced over two-and-a-half years ago. This installer was, for many years, one of the ugliest parts of the project because anyone who programmed on Debian rarely considered the programme they used to load it onto their computer.
Which is where Mr Shuttleworth returns to earth. He was once a Debian developer before he became a space-travelling millionaire. The task he has now set himself is to smarten Debian up.
He is paying Debian developers to create releases based on the project, but at regular, six-monthly intervals. His coders are working on a smoother installation experience and he is publicising his new, tidier, Debian. Mr Shuttleworth's approach is a strange mixture of philanthropy and tech entrepreneurism.His company, Canonical, intends to provide paid support to corporations and his staff are working on a range of utilities to accelerate the translation of Debian's most important applications into more languages, including those of his own overlooked continent, Africa.
The company has released a version on time, long before Debian moved onto its next release. It is, like its ancestor, free to use and adapt.
Debian developers seem torn: some are suspicious that Mr Shuttleworth's money will draw work away from the needs of their slow-paced central project, while others are pleased at the competition, which is nothing like traditional business competition.
Thanks to its open source licence, Debian and Canonical can freely lift and improve each other's code.
It seems the perfect next project for Mr Shuttleworth, an act of generosity that requires business sense and marketing skill, a chance to give back, as Apollo's plaque on the moon has it, to all mankind, and, perhaps, to reassure himself of that doubt that all dotcom millionaires must have: that success isn't just a matter of money or blind luck.
