"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."

We would love to work with IBM. 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 optimise 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 explaining the company's open-source strategy on its software at a Sun-sponsored event for partners and customers. 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, “We're not going to make them choose." Sun launched a line of servers using AMD chips in late 2003, but it expects AMD and Intel to "leapfrog each other" with improvements in their processors and price advantages.

McNealy stepped down last April, but said he has frequent contact with his successor, CEO Jonathan Schwartz -- exchanging a dozen e-mails each day and meeting once a week. McNealy said that while he may give Schwartz lots of advice, "one of the reasons Jonathan got the job is because he ignores a lot of it."