Even so, Sun officials said there is significant open-source community development work in progress that may or may not bear fruit. The projects include porting Solaris to IBM 's PowerPC chip and porting DTrace, an application performance tool in Solaris 10, to FreeBSD, an x86-compatible operating system.

Although some 9,000 non-Sun employees are involved in OpenSolaris.org, and thousands of messages are being posted on mailing lists, development boils down to the efforts of the determined few.

For instance, Devon O'Dell, a systems engineer at iXsystems Inc. in San Jose, is working on donated equipment on his own time to port DTrace to FreeBSD. O'Dell said that the project will take a year or more to complete but that a corporate sponsor could help reduce development time to six months.

Rich Teer, a Unix consultant in Kelowna, British Columbia, is working on an open-source Solaris project affecting its terminal session. The project is getting his "spare time," but Teer said he expects to complete it in January.

Analysts aren't predicting how Sun's open-source strategy will fare but some believe it could make it easier for users to adopt Sun's products.