Sources close to BEA Systems have confirmed that the San Jose, CA-based company will today be announcing a major contribution to the world of open source. 

The industry was widely expecting BEA to make public its open-source plans - codenamed "Beehive" internally - at next week's BEA eWorld technology conference (24-27 May) in San Francisco, but it looks now as if a decision has been taken to make the announcement today instead, perhaps in response to the softening of the company's share price in the past five days.

At BEA eWorld, Cliff Schmidt, BEA's WebLogic Workshop product manager for standards strategy, has long been slated to give a  WebLogic Workshop session entitled "New Product Announcement: BEA's Open Source Plans," but at the recent quarterly earnings call BEA chairman and CEO Alfred Chuang made no specific reference to any plan to proliferate Workshop in an exponential way save through the regular licensing channels - he was candid with analysts that the company needed to "ramp up" adoption of WebLogic 8.1, saying:

"12% of total license revenue came from platforms, almost all from 8.1 - we're seeing upgrades from 5.0 and 6.0 to 8.1 - but we think the 8.1 explosion of revenue is yet to come."

Now it looks as if "Beehive" may become a major part of BEA's plan to fight back, by enlisting the energy and creativity of OS developers in its cause: releasing the WebLogic Workshop application development framework, which sits on top of WebLogic Server, as open source,  would mean developers could potentially run application code generated through WebLogic Workshop on any application server they want, BEA or non-BEA, commercial or open-source.

Typically the open source projects that have been deployed in the SME space have been tactical rather than strategic projects, but this announcement is aimed at changing that by making parts of WebLogic Workshop available to OS developers so that they can build scalable, secure apps on the so-called "OS Java" platform, - i.e., strategic projects for major companies, not just in-house experiments for SMEs.