Bray explained that a bug was discovered that prevented the x86 version of Solaris from running on the Eclipse platform. Sun then contacted Eclipse and got "committer" status so the bug could be fixed, Bray added.

"This is not very surprising," Bray said with regard to Sun contributing to Eclipse. The company contributes to lots of open source projects, such as Mozilla, he said.

"There is no intimation that we are backing away from NetBeans or anything like that," Bray said.

Sun previously considered joining Eclipse, but the move never came to fruition.

In another Eclipse-related move, IBM officials at JavaOne on Thursday discussed a planned software lifecycle management platform called Jazz, for team collaboration.