"As Mike Milinkovich has said many times in the past, Sun would be welcome to join if they choose to do so, but there are no plans for this to happen at this time," an Eclipse representative said in an e-mail on Thursday morning.

Sun's John Gage, chief researcher and vice president of the science office at Sun, acknowledged at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco on Thursday that an integration was occurring with Eclipse.

The move does not mean, however, that Sun is ready to join Eclipse, Sun officials said when interviewed at the conference.

"I don't think that's what [the x86 move] means," said David Bryant, senior director of application platform products at Sun. Rather, the move is intended to ensure that the Eclipse IDE works on Solaris x86.

"If we are [joining Eclipse], nobody told me. I really don't think we are," said Tim Bray, Sun director of Web technologies.