"If you are an HP employee, it is impossible to do a day's work without interacting with Linux somewhere," he said.

"We don't just use Linux internally and sell Linux products, we also feel we have a responsibility to work with and give back to the Linux community."

HP has a kernel team in Colorado, provides a substantial amount of source code to the community, and has initiated more than 60 open source projects, according to Fink.

Looking forward, Fink said HP plans to focus increasingly on integration and ultimately end-to-end, lifecycle management in the open source space.

"HP brings all the pieces together. We can design specific components that suit our customer and then work with them on how to manage it over time," he said.