Steven O'Grady, senior analyst at Denver-based RedMonk LLC, said in a statement that the library is important because in the open-source world, the community behind a project is at least as important as the source code itself. As a result, the BIRT code will be available to a much broader audience than in the past, O'Grady said.

BIRT 2.0 also includes an enhanced reporting engine that Thoma said can handle much larger reports and can scale to thousands of simultaneous users. The report design tool adds drag-and-drop capabilities for business users, including the ability to access top selling products and sales people with one click, he said.

While the code will be available today, Actuate said it will begin providing indemnification, maintenance and support for BIRT 2.0 by the end of February.