[flohofwoe]

My experience is entirely different, 3rd party middle-ware without source is almost always a pain to work with (even a pain to evaluate, sometimes you get a license-key which locks the evaluation copy to one machine, for a limited time, etc). When bugs show up you cannot simply debug-step into the middleware libraries, instead you have to do a lot of guess-work trying to reproduce the bug, and then follows endless ticket back-and-forths with support. Having the source code is also always better when integrating the middleware into your own build process, since you need binary libs that match exactly your compiler version and build settings (exceptions disabled? link-time-code-generation? etc...) I could rant on forever of how much not having source code access sucks ;)