Comments from the horses mouth (Score 2, Informative)

Hi all, I'm an employee at JasperSoft, and I would like to take some time to clear up some misconceptions going around in this discussion about JasperReports and JasperSoft. First off, nobody ever said anything about JasperReports becoming closed source. JasperReports will always remain open source, and the open source projectwill continue to be enhanced. We are helping Teodor Danciu (the author of JasperReports) devote more time to JasperReports and bring on more contributers. Frankly, to acquire all the rights to a successful open source project and then close the source would be insane - what's the point? Take a look as JBoss as an example of a company doing similar work. They have "acquired" Hibernate, Nukes, jBPM, etc in a manner very similar to what we have done with JasperReports. I think there is concern here because JBoss is an open source company, and the ZD story calls us "a commercial software company". We (and JBoss) are both - a commercial company that offers open source software. The commercial side makes its profit by selling support and services, and possibly add-on functionality. Personally I think a lot of the discussion here is ignoring the real question - "what does the acquisition mean to current users of JasperReports?" The heart and soul of an open source project consist of the developers AND the community using and enhancing the project. What does JasperSoft mean to the JasperReports users? It means that JasperReports development will continue, and that Teodor Danciu will spend more time working on it than he could previously. It means people who want to use JasperReports but require support will have a place to go to. -Barry Klawans