Shawn Willett, an analyst with Current Analysis Inc. in Sterling, Va., said the release of the messaging and BPEL tools, along with WSIT, signals that Sun is moving to provide the components for companies to build an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).

"They are trying to come out with things a step ahead of JBoss, who doesn't have their act together in terms of an ESB yet," he said. "The SeeBeyond technology has a lot of features in it and will automatically be a leading open source contender."

In addition, Sun's portal is more feature rich than others available in open source, and likely will be popular in the open source community, he said.

Sun was selling the developer tools at rock-bottom prices already, he said. The move to release them to open source is designed to check the popularity of the open source Eclipse IDE, according to Willett.