Hewlett-Packard is stepping up its membership in The Linux Foundation, an investment that will allow the giant IT vendor to play a bigger role in Linux initiatives.

HP, previously a Gold member of The Linux Foundation, has upgraded its membership to Platinum, the foundation said Monday at the LinuxCon Europe conference in Barcelona, Spain.

As a Platinum member HP gains a seat on the foundation's board of directors and "will be directly involved in advancing Linux-based initiatives, workgroups, labs, events and more that support its business goals," the foundation said in a statement.

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Other Platinum members include Fujitsu, IBM, Intel, NEC, Oracle, the Qualcomm Innovation Center and Samsung.

The Linux Foundation, founded in 2000, is a consortium of companies that champions the growth of Linux and sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds. The organization describes itself as "a neutral forum for collaboration and education" that hosts conferences such as LinuxCon, generates Linux-related research and offers extensive Linux training. It owns the Linux.com website.

HP offers a broad range of products that run on Linux, including its ProLiant Servers, the HP BladeSystem and HP Integrity Servers; the HP StorageWorks storage systems; and HP workstation and desktop computers. The company sells the Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and Canonical Ubuntu distributions of Linux.

HP has been positioning its webOS mobile operating system, which it acquired in 2010 when it bought mobile device maker Palm, as an open-source product for smartphones, tablets and PCs. Open webOS 1.0, released in September, is built on OpenEmbedded, a development framework for Linux on embedded devices.

"Linux is a strategic asset for all major technology companies. With our Linux Foundation Platinum membership, we will have a variety of ways to maximize our investment in Linux and collaborative development that advances our own business as well as greater industry innovation," said Eileen Evans, HP vice president and associate general counsel, cloud computing and open source, in the foundation's statement.

"Because of this history and innate knowledge of software development, HP understands that Linux and collaborative development can benefit its business across its product portfolio," said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation, in the statement. "We're looking forward to the work we can accomplish with HP."

PUBLISHED NOV. 5, 2012