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On May Day (May 1, 2000), a point when financial markets seemed to have lost faith in Linux as a “Big Trend” (many Linux stocks lost most of their value in the first third of the year), a big chunk of change—$37 million, to be exact—was invested in Lineo, Inc., which is emerging as the leading embedded Linux software company.

In an interesting twist, the list of sources for that money includes only three venture capital firms. Another fourteen investors are actual or potential Lineo customers, including familiar names like Motorola, Samsung, Mitsubishi, Compaq, Citrix and Acer—plus a raft of motherboard, laptop and component manufacturers in Taiwan, Japan and Korea. These include DaiShin Information and Communications, First International Computer, Global Alliance, Hikari Tsushin, Arima and Mitac International. The VCs are Egan Managed Capital, J&W Seligman and Astoria Capital Partners.

These manufacturers are players. “There is a substantial interest on the part of major manufacturers in embedded Linux. And we include in that category a variety of software, hardware, components and solutions for embedded systems. These are smart companies that got to where they are by knowing how both to predict market trends and sense what's happening right now,” says Lyle Ball, Vice President of Communications and co-founder of Lineo.

The most interesting aspect of this news is that it appears to be something unusual: a very traditional “Old Economy” play. These manufacturers want to put Linux in their products, not just score a big run-up off a Lineo IPO (which, of course, they certainly wouldn't mind).

To get the significance of this, consider the little-discussed fact that every company has two markets: one for its goods and services and another for itself. Before the New Economy showed up, the latter market was extremely secondary, even for publicly traded companies. Value was all. Growth mattered, but there was no prevailing imperative to take a new company public or to run its value up to the sky overnight. But the get-big-quick imperative of the New Economy led to biased business conversations over the last several years, so that talk about investment has drowned out talk about the fundamentals of business. And this kind of talk has been endemic to the commercial Linux market ever since Red Hat went public last August and instantly branded Linux as the hot “growth topic” of 1999.

But this investment appears to be operating on the Old Economy imperative, which is to support product and service innovation. At least, this is what a long and manufacturer-heavy list of investors suggests.

What this also suggests is that Linux will probably expand from servers to appliances and other embedded devices more quickly than it will spread to clients—although there is no shortage of desktop and laptop manufacturers on this list of investors.

As Lineo sees it, the embedded Linux market shapes up this way: