"Community to enterprise is a big opportunity," he said, adding that with the cost of deploying and maintaining Fedora, it would be more cost-effective for some of those customers to purchase a subscription from Red Hat. It is up to the company to get that message out, Whitehurst said.

Some customers also are stretching their RHEL subscriptions and deploying the OS beyond what the company permits according to its license, he noted, which is another opportunity for Red Hat to educate customers about its business model and derive new revenue.

"There are people who have one copy [of RHEL] and call us 100 times a year, which means they probably [are running] more than one instance," Whitehurst said. "We have to make sure we're out driving our value propositions and letting people know it doesn't mean it's freely copyable just because it's open source."