Open Source or Shareware?

[gabrielinux]

JasperServer is an excellent report server. It provides fast, easy and flexible reporting capabilities for businesses of all sizes. It has everything from support for OLAP cubes and data marts, to charts, to sub reports, to dashboards. Wait, did I say dashboards? Scratch that. JasperServer Professional has support for dashboards, but not JasperServer Community Edition.

 

Dashboards, a simple an intuitive function that one would expect to find in any sub-mature BI product, is not present in the "open source" edition of JasperServer. So essentially, the open source community only gets a taste of the pro version. If they want a fully functional, usable, enterprise-ready product, they must pay to obtain the Professional Edition. So in a way, JasperSoft has not captured the true sense of "open source." JasperSoft’s "community edition" software is nothing more than shareware. It is shareware in the sense that you only get a peek into the product, but you can't get the essential features -- such as dashboards -- unless you pay. Therefore, JasperServer Community Edition, although by all legal means "open source," is morally and functionally nothing more than shareware with viewable source code.

 

** Originally posted on the author's blog at http://blog-gabriel.mongefranco.com **

[swood]

While it is true that JasperServer Professional has some features that are not in JasperServer Community Edition, it is way off base to call JasperServer Community Edition "shareware". I think the active and growing open source community around JasperServer Community Edition finds the functionality useful, though everyone always wants more, of course.

 

 

 

One person's "essential" is another person's "nice to have". The browser-based development of dashboards is a JasperServer Professional v3 feature, but the same functionality can be achieved today in JasperServer Community Edition via sub reports and hyperlinks.

 

 

Jaspersoft is always adding features to JasperServer Community Edition, like the AJAX based repository browser coming out in JasperServer Community Edition v3 out next week (end of June) and works with the community, like the JasperReports/JasperServer Flash viewer, which was a contribution. Jaspersoft also supports the JasperServer open source community with installers, documentation and an active set of forums and community projects on JasperForge.

 

 

Sherman

Jaspersoft

 

PS. I also commented on Gabriel's blog post.

[swood]

Gabriel and others have discussed on his blog about the need for dashboards in JasperServer. There are several ways to do it today.

 

1. Use sub reports to get a multi-panel look and feel for a report that fits on a single screen. There are examples of this in JasperReports, which can be deployed to JasperServer.

 

2. Edit JSPs and set the user's home page as has been done at http://www.jasperforge.org/index.php?option=com_joomlaboard&Itemid=215&func=view&id=38491&catid=10

 

 

 

Sherman

Jaspersoft

Post edited by: swood, at: 2008/06/26 18:33

[vishal29bhp]

Hi Swood,

This link is not working . It is redirecting to the login page of jasperforge.Can i have the new link to see this post.

 

Thanks in Advance

 

Vishal