But HP is not interested, an HP representative said.

During his presentation at the conference and in a subsequent interview, Schwartz said Sun has proposed merging the road maps of HP-UX and Solaris.

"We'll see if we can make progress there," Schwartz said.

Solaris 10 has been downloaded 4 million times in the past year, according to Sun. This is more licenses than HP has shipped with HP-UX in the entire history of HP's Unix OS, said Schwartz. If HP accepts Sun's offer, then HP-UX customers would be migrated over to Solaris, Schwartz said.

"I think HP-UX customers are feeling a little abandoned right now" without a Unix platform to run on x64-based systems, he said. "We obviously have the highest volume Unix in the x64 world and that presents a unique opportunity for HP to give HP-UX customers a path forward and not a path backward into Itanium."