Jasper Reports Licensing

[karmayogi]

Hello All,

 

I am a new user who is interested in using JasperReports for our application. But I see a lot of conflicting information about the licensing involved with this. This is my understanding so far, can someone please clarify it for me.

 

1) If I download the jasperreports.jar file from sourceforge.net or jasperforge.org, then I am acquiring the reports utility under the LGPL license.

2) If I need the other types of licenses, then I would go to JasperSoft.com and contact them to get support and other types of editions.

 

By the way, you guys have done some excellent work on the reports, I just love it.

 

Thanks,

Yogi

 

P.S: I think it will help a lot of people if something explicit is mentioned about the various licensing models. The ambiguity actually makes it difficult to convince management to go with open source solutions.

[teodord]

Hi,

 

Although you say information is conflicting, you actually got it pretty right.

 

You can download and use the JasperReports library under the terms of the LGPL license just as most of the people do.

 

But if you need support and other kind of services available from JasperSoft.com, then you will probably enter a commercial relationship with us in which you benefit from the services we offer and get a commercial license, which will allow you to do more with the product.

 

But as you pointed out, step 2 is only optional. Nothing prevents you from starting to use JasperReports under LGPL right away, free of charge.

 

I hope this helps.

Teodor

[karmayogi]

Thanks a lot Teodor,

 

I just wanted to have valid information, before I presented it to upper management.

 

Keep up the good work.

 

Thanks,

Yogi B)

[muttley]

Sorry to jump in Teodor and karmayogi :),

 

(Also sorry if this is the second post, my browser had a 'moment' back there :blush:)

 

If I write a web application using JasperReports jars and rent it out to users, then , as I understand it, I need to : -

Allow users to download the jars & source code

Allow users to see / download the LGPL

Not modify the code in the jars

 

Do I need to add a marker to any report showing that it is based on LGPL and yadda yadda yadda... ?

 

Kevin.

[teodord]

Hi,

 

No licensing text required in reports.

You need to provide the license text file along with the JAR when you distribute it.

And yes, LGPL applies to you as long as you don't modify the code and only use JR as a dependency library.

 

I hope this helps.

Teodor

[marlow.agents]

I know this post is very old but I still think it is an issue. I am new to JasperReports. I just started reading up on it today. I started with the entry on wikipedia and the project webpage on sourceforge.  Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JasperReports has a section that says:

"Jaspersoft provides commercial software around the JasperReports product, and negotiate contracts with software developers that wish to embed the JasperReports engine into a closed source product."

This makes it looks like JasperReports cannot be used in proprietary software. Going to the sourceforge page no further light is shed on this. I had to google and found this discussion thread. I think that a link to a page that discusses software licenses would be very useful.

If such a page is created then I hope it will talk about free versus proprietary. Mentioning free of charge only confuses the issue. It seems to me that the cummunity edition of JasperReports is released under the LGPL. This should make it free software. That's free as in freedom.