Business intelligence (BI) software vendor Business Objects used this week's LinuxWorld Conference in San Francisco to underline its commitment to the open-source community by launching a new version of its Crystal Reports reporting engine for the Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE).

The company said Crystal Reports for Eclipse would provide report design and deployment functionality for software developers using the Eclipse IDE, allowing them to embed report capabilities into applications.

Richard Neale of Business Objects said developers would be able to download the new suite and use it to design and deploy reports on a single server for free. Firms rolling out an application featuring the software across multiple servers will have to buy Crystal Reports for Eclipse Professional for $495 (£260) per server, he added.

There have been over 50,000 downloads of the beta version since it was launched in January, so Neale is expecting widespread support for the software among Eclipse developers.

"Eclipse could well become a de facto standard for Java developers and there are plenty of those developers out there with Crystal skills," Neale said. " They can now make use of those skills in the Eclipse environment."

The move takes Business Objects into direct competition with BI rival Actuate, which last year launched the first BI toolset for the Eclipse environment. Actuate's Business Intelligence Reporting Tools (Birt) suite has since become popular among Eclipse developers, but Neale said the new version of Crystal Reports will offer them alternative BI functionality.