It is the day before BEA World Prague, and it seems like a good time to revisit what BEA's position on open source is. As I travel across the globe, I have been describing our position to developers, and they instinctively understand it. I wanted to write it down, in order to be able to refer to it.

Our position is simple: What is best for developers and companies is what is best for BEA. Enterprise Java is hard. Open Source solutions can often make things simpler and provide an extra measure of flexibility. We love open source and still commit millions of $ of investment to it annually. But the fact of the matter is that the mere existence of open source does not invalidate the need for producing commercial-grade software for paying customers

They key word in all of this is Blended. I have written on Blended Development before, mainly in reference to BEA Workshop, and open source frameworks like Hibernate. We actively support this and encourage their use. Our view is that the customer will make an informed choice, and it is our job to support them.

We strongly believes in blended application development , combining Open Source solutions with commercial application servers. This is why we certify top frameworks (like Beehive, Struts, Spring) to work on WebLogic Server, and provide open source-based tooling in our Workshop product. By supporting blended solutions, we can help companies chose the right blend for their needs and we can offer a natural migration path when they need to move up to higher levels of reliability, performance and service.

BEA understands that open source is about community as much as technology. From the beginning, we have worked to build strong relationships in highly-respected open source communities, starting with Apache and more recently with Eclipse. Not only do we integrate and support existing open source solutions, we are also actively contributing back to the ecosystem. See the Eclipse site to get an idea of what folks like BEA's own Tim Wagner are doing.