One attendee, Dusan Korac, a senior systems administrator with Science Applications International Corp. who works on both Sun and IBM systems, said he would like to see IBM take a course similar to Sun and open up AIX to the developers. Korac works on systems for a federal agency.

Asked about the idea of running Solaris on a Power system, Korac shook his head and said he would probably not be interested in such a configuration. But he does believe that IBM should take a course similar to Sun and open-source the AIX operating system.

In Korac's view, Sun's decision to open-source its operating system was a good move because it now draws in contributions from the development community. Open-sourcing is "how you attract people to work on it," he said.

In other comments at the event, McNealy said the new Intel partnership gives the open-source Solaris a platform on the two major x86-based processor vendors, Intel and AMD, as well as on Sun hardware. He also called the Intel agreement a major step toward wider adoption of Solaris in government agencies and large businesses.

Sun will not push Intel over AMD or vice versa, McNealy said during a news conference after his speech. "Some people are Ford folks, and some people are Chevy folks," he said. "We're not going to make them choose."