I'm a fan of open-source. I love the whole concept. What I don't love is when someone tries to straddle the line by creating an open-source product that they charge a license for then completely disappear off the face of the planet when you need to update said license or get a new one for the open-source packet to work correctly. That's right, I'm talking about you Thyme (Extrosoft). You don't hear me, though, because without so much as a "hey, we're closing our doors, here's a script to unlock all your licenses" - POOF. Nada. I'm not sure if it's all the chatter I've been reading on the new "Trust Agents" book by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith but the concept of trust, doing right, doing good in the world of web development seems even more complicated when you factor in open-source.

This does bring up an issue (actually many issues, but one that I'll discuss here) when developing on open-source platforms (like Joomla, Drupal or even Wordpress). If you develop an application/component/pluging whatever that is working with another open-source app/comp/plug/whatev you run a maor risk in getting hosed down the road if you are bound by some sort of license. We built a custom registration component for Joomla that integrates flawlessly with Thyme so when viewing Thyme events - if there's a registration attached to that event - there's a "Register Now" button on the page.

Bring on the scramble. Of course we found out that Thyme disappeared 2 days before having to deliver to a client (awesome) so had to rally for a solution. Our trusted development team (conveniently located in Belarus...) suggested JEvents. At first, like trying out any new product, it was easy to see all the "Well Thyme did it better" issues, but I must say that after running it a couple of times now for a few clients I'm quite impressed.

It does need some help on making layout changes a bit simpler, but for the most part it handles everything quite nicely with the added bonus that it's fully integrated within Joomla (as opposed to Thyme being a bridge component). There's a great locations manager, categories, various views, great menu options, easy install and configuration. One other nice thing that wasn't on Thyme is that I can use the system WYSIWYG so when training clients there's not a disconnect.

The only bummer is that now I had to go back and do more development on our event registration component so that it would work with JEvents, but overall, I think we've been able to rebound.

I guess it is true that you get what you pay for?