SUN MICROSYSTEMS AND Hewlett-Packard are expected to announce separately Monday that they will make projects under development at the companies available to developers under the open-source model, adding further support to the collaborative development mo

The announcements come at the start of the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, which begins Monday in San Diego. The event features technical workshops for developers and discussions with industry executives about the latest projects to come out of the open-source movement, which preaches the free distribution of source code. Sun said it will announce its fourth open-source project at the event, its Grid Engine distributed computing software. The software is designed to allow large corporations and organizations to link hundreds to thousands of computers together in order to collaborate on large-scale computing projects, basically doing the work of a supercomputer. Sun acquired the technology in July 2000 when it purchased a company called Gridware that developed the software. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based server vendor rebranded the software Sun Grid Engine soon after, and has since distributed the application to as many as 8,000 companies and developers, including Motorola and Sony. About 500,000 lines of code associated with Grid Engine will be available for download. That is in addition to a further 8 million lines of code available from Sun as part of its three other open-source projects: Open Office, an open-source version of its desktop software suite StarOffice; JXTA, its peer-to-peer computing project; and NetBeans, a set of open-source Java tools. HP, meanwhile, said it will make the source code for software related to its CoolTown project available for download Monday under the open-source model. CoolTown is a development platform for so-called pervasive computing, where users can link all manner of computing devices with people and places via the Internet.