Mark Shuttleworth is South African, however Canonical is based out of London.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_(company)

Canonical is based in London, and Mark Shuttleworth is a British dual-citizen who has lived in the UK for more than 25 years (since before Ubuntu was founded).

Say what you like about the quality of the man or of the distro, but it is undeniably British.

I know we give Ubuntu and Canonical a hard time but I think we've got a lot to thank them for. They pretty much spearheaded the movement to change the image of Linux being purely for geeks, and I think there's a lot of non-enterprise software support that simply wouldn't be there without them drumming up interest.