JasperSoft released a bunch of news articles this week to correspond with LinuxWorldExpo, so I got a chance to brief with a bunch of journalists and analysts on the news. I was a bit surprised at how frequent questions about JasperForge were, since JasperForge was not one of the news items released this week. The single most common questions was best phrased as “So, you guys already own jaspersoft.com and jaspersoft.org, so why did you spend $35 to get jasperforge.org instead of using jaspersoft.org?”. Given how frequently the media and analysts wanted to know that I bet some of you are interested to.

To me that answer is clear. Any “jaspersoft.” domain is a corporate domain that we (JasperSoft) own and can do with as we please. JasperForge, on the other hand, is the community domain. It belongs to the community and we are only providing the resources. This is a place where developers and users can come, discuss any and all things related to Jasper, open source, BI, commercial open source, etc. In my vision projects that add on to and extend Jasper products are hosted here, sets of sample reports are posted, etc. Just because the title includes “Forge” don’t think its just for the developers - I want a user community here. Have you developed a couple of cool reports against a common application? Post them here!

Finally, a few folks have commented on how we are now competing with SourceForge. I don’t see it that way at all. We launched this site with help from VA Software (the folks behind SourceForge) and they are 100% behind us. (A clude: If you go the projects section of this forge you will see the SourceForge name.) SourceForge is a great place to get started and attract users, but once you have a suite of projects you really need to graduate to an environment where you combine related projects together and build your own community. SourceForge is really a collection of projects, not a community. I think over the next 12 months you will see other company backed projects migrate to their own forges.