Hi Felipe,
I'm facing the same problem in my project at work. The problem with the BIRT maven artifact is not only that it is not available for newer versions of BIRT, but also that it is inherently broken. This is because BIRT directly includes some of its dependencies instead of linking them dynamically (as it would be required for a working maven artifact).
The next problem is that the BIRT community is essentially dead. There are almost no contributions to the BIRT source code from outside of OpenText and the OpenText employers that *are* still working on BIRT are not very communicative in relation to people outside of OpenText (Me being the only one answering to your email is quite an example of this, isn't it?). There was some sort of statement from OpenText that this is going to change in the future, and there have been some committer elections lately (electing OpenText employers) but apart from that nothing has really changed. We will see, maybe OpenText is able to turn the ship around after all, but at this time we have all reason to be skeptical.
Whatsoever, there is a bit of hope: There seem to be quite a few companies (small to medium) that are still using BIRT in their projects. I currently know of my own employer and another company in Germany. We are currently trying to get to grips with the BIRT codebase to fix some of the apparent problems, the main one being the maven artifact. We also thought about founding some sort of BIRT user group, where we can exchange about problems and solutions when using BIRT. If you want, I can keep you up to date on our progress.
We have also started to do some work on the code base independently from the official BIRT repository (since getting changes in there requires a review from an OpenText employee and getting such is hard as I already explained). You can find my fork on github:
https://github.com/Flugtiger/birt There you can also find two small how-tos on how to build BIRT and how to setup an IDE for developing BIRT. If you want to help, go there, try the howtos, post issues, make pull requests, ask questions. We would appreciate that and help you in turn, if you have any kind of problem.
Best Regards
Alex
