"There's a lot of innovation that's happening outside the four walls of a software vendor or a hardware vendor," said Anant Jhingran, CTO of information management at IBM.

"The only way to actually then acknowledge that fact of life is to actually participate," Jhingran said. All the companies represented on the panel are in the business of participating in open source rather than subverting it, he said.

PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor), for its part, serves as an open source project that can benefit Oracle, said Oracle's Michael Olson, vice president of embedded technologies at the company. "We believe this is a good way to get more people building Oracle apps."

Oracle, he said, has participated in development of Linux in the hope of making customers successful on the platform.

"This isn't flash-in-the-pan stuff. We're not trying to subvert it," said Olson. The company also recognizes it is not going to invent everything on its own and must participate in the community, he added. The company last week, for its part, to extend support to Red Hat Linux users.