Is Sun Microsystems ready to join the rival Eclipse Foundation for open source tooling?Well, a top Sun official, Rich Green, Sun executive vice president of software, declined to answer the question directly on Monday. But he and Jonathan Schwartz, Sun CEO, made it clear Sun views its NetBeans platform as a viable alternative to Eclipse and that NetBeans will continue. “I don’t really think I’ve met any developer who said, ‘Oh yes, I only want one tool,’ ” Green said at the NetBeansDay event in San Francisco. “NetBeans is growing far more quickly than Eclipse,” he said. Sun’s Tim Bray, Sun director of Web technologies, also declined to respond to a question about Sun participating in Eclipse, when asked at the CommunityOne event on Monday. This event is held as a curtain-raiser to the JavaOne conference.A Sun alignment with Eclipse could give the organization access to Sun’s impressive roster of software technologists. Eclipse is participating in this week’s JavaOne event but has done so in the past, with no Sun membership in Eclipse forthcoming as a result. Sun and Microsoft remain perhaps the only major software companies not participating in Eclipse. Founder IBM as well as companies such as Oracle and BEA Systems all have climbed aboard. Software Development