Thawte
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Thawte Consulting is a certificate authority (CA) for X.509 certificates. Thawte was founded in 1995 by Mark Shuttleworth in South Africa and is the second largest public CA on the Internet.
[edit] Sale
In 1999 VeriSign acquired Thawte in a stock purchase from Shuttleworth for $575 million US dollars. Both VeriSign and Thawte had certificates in the first Netscape browsers, and were thus 'grandfathered' into all other web browsers. Before VeriSign's purchase, they each had about 50% of the market. VeriSign's certificate rollover was due to take place on 1 January 2000 - an unfortunate choice considering the imminent Y2K bug. The purchase of Thawte ensured there would be no business loss over Y2K.
The sale enabled Shuttleworth to become the second space tourist, and to fund the Ubuntu project.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Thawte Consulting - World-Wide Web Site
- Thawte Consulting - French Web Site
- Thawte Consulting - German Web Site
- VeriSign, Inc - Parent Company
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