Motorola unit buys into Linux developer

Motorola's wholly owned Metrowerks subsidiary plans to invest $22.5m in Lineo, a Linux software and applications developer.

The mobile phone giant said Metrowerks will acquire three million of Lineo's shares - about eight per cent of Lineo's issued capital stock. The Linux developer has also agreed to sell Motorola two million warrants to be converted into common shares of Lineo.

Fred Shlapak, Motorola's executive vice president of semiconductor products, said the company is committed to establishing Linux as the open platform of choice for embedded development, particularly as its customers require increasingly complex capabilities in embedded devices.

The investment and strategic partnership will result in joint products and services from all three companies, said Shlapak. The companies will work on combining Lineo's embedded Linux product, Embedix, with Metrowerk's CodeWarrior Integrated Development Environment for the next generation of embedded products. CodeWarrior for Embedix will support Motorola PowerPC, ColdFire, M-Core and 68K architectures.

Lineo chief executive Bryan Sparks said the deal strengthens the developer's commitment to the use of Linux in the embedded market. Lineo sells a version of Linux for embedded non-PC computing devices such as set-top boxes. The company filed its initial public offering plans in May.

Lineo competes with Red Hat, Wind River Systems and LynuxWorks. For the six months ending 30 April, the company reported revenue of $2.8m and a net loss of $8.5m.