Roth rejected the claims. "I would say that our business remains strong," Roth said. The company believes it is making the right moves, Roth added.

Further criticizing BEA, Nielsen said, "Our view is that the core application server itself is becoming commoditized much like a virtual machine, so we don't think our business should be built on [the application server]," Nielsen said. A business should be built on delivering value to customers, he said. BEA has maintained its application server offers value and features above and beyond what is available in open source application servers.

BEA has its own BEAWorld show in Santa Clara, Calif. next week. In addition to extending support of open source frameworks, the company at the show is expected to shed more light on Project Bare Metal'. This project is intended to enable Java Virtual Machines to run directly on computer hardware without the need for an operating system, thus boosting performance.

Despite the disagreements between BEA and Oracle, the companies both are intent on maintaining their application servers as commercial items to be sold, rather than as open source technologies to be given away.

"We're still going to charge for ours," Nielsen said.