Typically, the school has to wait weeks or even months for new product keys. "So that is pretty useful," said Grim.

He also said Sun's earlier move to open the Solaris source code has already given his IT department early access to new Sun technologies, like the ZFS file system that will be included in Solaris 10 next year. Such early access lets his IT staff begin testing before the technology is released as part of the operating system.

But Sun officials said the latest open-source effort is first aimed at winning developer support and encouraging them to adapt Sun technology in new ways, rather than attracting the attention of IT managers. "These are folks that don't necessarily have access to a lot of money, but they certainly have the ability to move the landscape," said Sun President Jonathan Schwartz last week.

Once developers come on board, Sun hopes they can convince IT managers of the value of Sun software, he said.

As the OpenSolaris effort shows, however, the development community moves slowly. To date, most of the OpenSolaris community development work has been on bug fixes and minor updates.