It's catching on slower than expected, but more companies are signing up

In February, 2003, electronics giant Motorola Inc. (MOT ) stunned the mobile-phone business with a bold change of course. During the industry's annual shindig in Cannes, the Schaumberg (Ill.) company announced the world's first handset built around the Linux operating system and unveiled plans to use the populist software in consumer phones from then on. . . .

It's catching on slower than expected, but more companies are signing up

In February, 2003, electronics giant Motorola Inc. (MOT ) stunned the mobile-phone business with a bold change of course. During the industry's annual shindig in Cannes, the Schaumberg (Ill.) company announced the world's first handset built around the Linux operating system and unveiled plans to use the populist software in consumer phones from then on. Pundits saw this as a slap at Symbian Ltd., the London software consortium Motorola co-founded five years earlier with Nokia Corp. (NOK ) and Ericsson to develop software for feature-rich smart phones. It was also a major lift for Linux, the grassroots operating system that until then was used mainly on servers.

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