I am not familiar (at all) with BIRT, but I wanted to pass on their announcement of a new contest for Flash and Flex developers. The Get BIRT-y with Flash and Flex contest is open now till March 10 and has a nice (and large) cash prize of up to $5,000 for the winner. From my (seriously) 30 second glimpse, it looks like BIRT involves visualization and is open source, so it may be something for Flex folks to take a look at anyway (and if any of you guys have experience with BIRT, post a quick comment).
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BIRT's an open source reporting platform. It's the open source component of a commercial reporting platform called Actuate.
I have written several independent reviews and tutorials about BIRT which provide a quick and easy way to understand the product range (both open source and commercial) and enables potential users to evaluate the software and get started easily.
See http://www.BirtReporting.com for details and free downloads.