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, and dashboards. Wait, did I say dashboards? Scratch that. JasperServer Professional edition 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 users 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 users only get a peek into the product, but can't get the essential features -- such as dashboards -- unless they pay. Although it is true that not everyone needs dashboards or every feature available in the professional edition, it is also true that those who users who do need these futures would expect them to be included in the suite. The reason, after all, that these users chose JasperServer is that they can get a business intelligence suite that is open source. If these users were looking for half-functional products, they could have picked any other demo or shareware. Therefore, JasperServer Community Edition, although by all legal means "open source," is morally and functionally nothing more than shareware with viewable source code.
Writing / Business