The Schaumburg, company announced today it plans to buy 3 million shares of Lineo, an embedded Linux solution developer, for US$22.5 million. Its acquisition of 8 percent of the Lindon, Utah, company's issued shares will take place through Motorola's wholly owned subsidiary Metrowerks.
A company spokesman said Motorola was committed to establishing Linux as the open platform choice for embedded development, particularly as its customers require increasingly more complex capabilities in embedded devices.
Al Gillan, an analyst for International data in Framingham, welcomed the announcement, saying the ongoing commitment by the big players was further good news for the embedded Linux community.
"This deal will allow Motorola to influence Lineo [through Metrowerks] to cooperate and work on projects that are beneficial to it," Gillan said. "As Motorola doesn't sell its own operating system, this deal will help boost the sale of its chips and products."
As a result of the investment and strategic partnership, Lineo and Metrowerks will work on combining Lineo's embedded Linux solution Embedix with Metrowerk's CodeWarrior Integrated Development Environment. CodeWarrior for Embedix will support Motorola processor architectures including PowerPC, ColdFire, M-CORE and 68K.
More news in the works
Bryan Sparks, Lineo's CEO, said the deal strengthened its commitment to the use of Linux in the embedded market and would provide embedded device manufacturers with more choice, flexibility and solutions in the future.
On Tuesday, Lineo will announce at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, a joint venture with Samsung of Korea to embed Linux in a range of Samsung products. It will also give details of an alliance with Access Japan to produce Internet appliances and reseller partnerships in Japan with Dia Semicon Systems and Kanematsu Semiconductor.
Not be outdone, Red Hat President and CEO Matthew Szulik and CTO Michael Tiemann tomorrow at the conference will brief the media and analysts on Red Hat's embedded strategy, showcasing a new generation of embedded devices from screen phones to smart calculators.
As expected, the Research Triangle Park, company today launched the Red Hat Network, a subscription service for distributing Linux updates and patches, kernel news and other developments. It also started shipping Version 7 of Red Hat Linux.
So far this year, Red Hat has acquired two embedded systems developers and landed contracts to help firms like Ericsson, Hitachi, Fujitsu and others design a new generation of embedded systems running open-source solutions. ENDS
