McNealy said he would like to see his Solaris operating system run on IBM's Power chip -- something he believes can happen, with or without IBM's help.

"We would love to work with IBM," said McNealy, adding that he believes such a move would give users, especially those in mixed environments, more platform options. But even without IBM's help, "we're going to do the slow and steady community development of Solaris on Power."

Sun and Intel officials said Monday that they have agreed on joint engineering development plans to optimize Solaris on Intel's processors. Sun will also sell a line of Intel-based systems along with its Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Opteron-based systems. "Solaris would be a wonderful arrow in the quiver of the Power server group to have, and I think it would open up the market significantly for the Power processor," McNealy said.

The Solaris open-source development community last year said it had ported Solaris to IBM's Power chip. IBM officials were not immediately available for comment.

McNealy was at a Sun-sponsored event Tuesday for partners and customers that was focused on explaining the company's open-source strategy on its software.