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heise open source: What do your clients think of JasperSoft software?

Paul Doscher: If I could cite a few statistics: We have 5000 paying customers in 82 different countries. The software is downloaded more than 200,000 times every month. The customer and the community as well is accepting the offer of open source BI software and using it to their advantage.

heise open source: Have you been able to see that people who are downloading the community version are switching to JasperSoft Professional and commercial support?

Paul Doscher: That's exactly what's happening. Someone downloads the software, registers it; maybe purchases the documentation, training, or support if they run into trouble. And the more they integrate the software into their IT environment, the greater is the tendency to come to us for support agreements and such. In other words, the customer decides at what point to come to us – whether for technical or commercial interaction.

heise open source: That sounds like a successful business model.

Paul Doscher: That it is. And the customer and the market decide what direction it's going to go. It's our responsibility to pay close attention to the community, in order to understand what it thinks is important.

heise open source: What happens to code that the community contributes? Do you adopt it?

Teodor Danciu, the creator of JasperReports

Teodor Danciu: As long as it works. We have developed a large and strong community over the years that is always giving us new ideas. We encourage developers to contribute functional improvements as patches in JasperForge. We test and revise the code and, if we think it's good, we add it to the source code. This has contributed several important features to JasperSoft. This helps us, because feedback improves the product and fills gaps that we don't see from our perspective.

heise open source: A tangible advantage of the open source development model?

Teodor Danciu: That's exactly why I started JasperReports using this model back then. To get feedback that would point me in the direction of the next stage of development. Another advantage is that it allows you to concentrate on the features that are really important.

Paul Doscher: I want to add here that our community portal, JasperForge, has more than 17,000 registered developers. In addition to this, our site offers space to 90 community projects that are expanding and building on our software. These range from extensions for JasperSoft to complete applications.

heise open source: JasperSoft's own universe?

Paul Doscher: Yes, a place where people can tailor the platforms exactly to their needs.

Teodor Danciu: By laying the source out there, the software develops naturally. When I started with JasperReports, I had a list of features. Through the feedback I got, the project developed in directions that I never could have foreseen. That's how our BI suite ultimately took shape. Everything started with JasperReports as a reporting engine for developers. Then, people came to the forum that made suggestions and said, for example, "I want a GUI. Can you make one?"

heise open source: You opened an office in Dublin not too long ago.

Paul Doscher: Almost a third of our customers is in Europe. After the US, Germany takes second place for the number of downloads. But the U.S. is still by far our greatest source of income. To reach our European customers better, we've opened an office in Dublin with a sales and support team.

heise open source: Why Dublin?

Paul Doscher: The employment law, the large pool of young talent, and especially the fact that there is a MySQL office there, all spoke in favour of Dublin. We work closely with database vendors. For a lot of American companies, Dublin is the first jumping-off point once they decide to cross the big pond and set up shop in Europe.

With this move, by the way, we are taking internationalisation seriously. Our software can adapt to the conditions of any land or language. We embrace Unicode and also support traditional, region-specific character coding systems, such as the Japanese nShift_JIS. Also, with JasperBabylon, we just created a platform that allows the community to take part in translating the software into other languages.

heise open source: To me, that is a good example of how you can put the knowledge and engagement of the community to good use.

Paul Doscher: Our philosophy of open source is: offer it globally, use it locally. That's why we are looking for European partners. We can also imagine that one day partners or system integrators may introduce themselves on JasperForge.

heise open source: Do you have plans to support other databases than MySQL in the open source version? PostgreSQL, for example?

Paul Doscher: We already support PostgreSQL through our partnership with EnterpriseDB. Their product is built around PostgreSQL. Theoretically, our software works with all databases that support OJDBC and XML.

Teodor Danciu: With the open source version, anyone has the freedom to change the configuration to suit their needs. This allows the software to operate with PostgreSQL . I assume that this also occurs in practice. It shouldn't be that difficult.

Paul Doscher: Maybe we should make a project out of that and host it on JasperForge.

heise open source: One last question: Sun recently put Java under a GPL license. Did that change anything for you?

Paul Doscher: No, but I think the decision was long overdue. In any case, it is good. Good for java and good for Sun, which is really a hardware company. Software is a means for Sun to sell more server hardware. From that perspective, it's interesting that conferences like this [Open Source meets Business] are usually sponsored in large part by big hardware manufacturers – in this case HP.

An implementation always consists of three things: hardware, software and services. Now software is free. With the money saved, you can either buy more or better hardware, or you can invest more in extra services – and that's good for everybody involved. (akl)

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