Hi everyone,
This is just an announcement to let you all know DragonByte Technologies Ltd. has parted ways with Chris (Ozzy47/OzzMods). I don’t want to go into too many details and disparage anyone, but I do feel you all deserve an explanation, so here’s what I’m willing to say.
DBTech, from day one, has been a family. It has always been about a group of friends coding together, working together and having fun together. If a member of the team gets ill, or is having personal problems, or is unable to code for a year due to the pressures of a new job, we don’t exercise any contractual right to reduce their pay or anything along those lines. We keep paying them their full wage, and other members of the team step up to support and/or upgrade their work while they’re incapacitated.
I bring that up only to demonstrate that for us, it’s really not about the money or anything like that. It’s about brotherhood and friendship.
Chris had done some things recently that made the entire team feel hurt and betrayed. When we tried to work with him to resolve them, he made it clear he would rather leave then work on repairing the damage.
This wasn’t about money (Chris recently received a raise, actually), it wasn’t about personal issues between team members, and it wasn’t about Chris disagreeing with how DBTech is run, or our policies, or anything like this. It was, in the simplest terms, Chris doing something behind the teams back, hurting all of us, being completely unapologetic about doing so and refusing to even consider trying to fix the situation.
Chris asked us to specify exactly what it was that made the team feel betrayed: He received an offer to take over mods from Christos Teriakis, including several modifications that compete with existing DBTech mods. That includes some that compete with a mod Chris recently saw Matt (@Mokonzi) put months of blood and sweat into, which he knew Matt is about to release. He didn’t inform any of the team he had received the offer, or that he had accepted it. The first any of us knew about it was when he released the competing mods on vBulletin.org.
We asked Chris to please pull/not release the mods competing with DBTech, but to instead give them to someone else to release. He informed us he didn’t want to do that. When we explained to Chris that we felt hurt and betrayed by him competing with his brothers, his response was that he was still unwilling to not release or pull any of the mods.
Regardless, we want to thank Chris for the time he gave to DBTech, and for being one of our brothers for the time he was with us. His contributions are appreciated.
Chris’s mods will be taken over by other members of the team and this will not affect the ongoing improvements of mods in his portfolio.
Chris was shown this statement before it was released and given the opportunity to correct anything he felt was inaccurate, or give a statement if he so wished. He declined, saying “Nah, you covered all the bases.”
None of us feel we entirely understand why Chris has chosen this course of action, and we’re all in something of a state of disbelief. His recent actions are not the actions of the Chris we know and love. Releasing this statement might not be the best thing to do from a PR standpoint, but if this situation has done anything, it has brought the rest of us closer as a family, and we feel you guys, our customers, are part of that and deserved an explanation.
Please don’t take this as some sort of call to dislike Chris. We won’t tolerate any disparagement of him. Despite recent events, he was still someone we called brother for a long time. Feel free to celebrate Chris’s time here and give him your comments below, but know that insulting him will not be tolerated.
Discuss this news here.
This is just an announcement to let you all know DragonByte Technologies Ltd. has parted ways with Chris (Ozzy47/OzzMods). I don’t want to go into too many details and disparage anyone, but I do feel you all deserve an explanation, so here’s what I’m willing to say.
DBTech, from day one, has been a family. It has always been about a group of friends coding together, working together and having fun together. If a member of the team gets ill, or is having personal problems, or is unable to code for a year due to the pressures of a new job, we don’t exercise any contractual right to reduce their pay or anything along those lines. We keep paying them their full wage, and other members of the team step up to support and/or upgrade their work while they’re incapacitated.
I bring that up only to demonstrate that for us, it’s really not about the money or anything like that. It’s about brotherhood and friendship.
Chris had done some things recently that made the entire team feel hurt and betrayed. When we tried to work with him to resolve them, he made it clear he would rather leave then work on repairing the damage.
This wasn’t about money (Chris recently received a raise, actually), it wasn’t about personal issues between team members, and it wasn’t about Chris disagreeing with how DBTech is run, or our policies, or anything like this. It was, in the simplest terms, Chris doing something behind the teams back, hurting all of us, being completely unapologetic about doing so and refusing to even consider trying to fix the situation.
Chris asked us to specify exactly what it was that made the team feel betrayed: He received an offer to take over mods from Christos Teriakis, including several modifications that compete with existing DBTech mods. That includes some that compete with a mod Chris recently saw Matt (@Mokonzi) put months of blood and sweat into, which he knew Matt is about to release. He didn’t inform any of the team he had received the offer, or that he had accepted it. The first any of us knew about it was when he released the competing mods on vBulletin.org.
We asked Chris to please pull/not release the mods competing with DBTech, but to instead give them to someone else to release. He informed us he didn’t want to do that. When we explained to Chris that we felt hurt and betrayed by him competing with his brothers, his response was that he was still unwilling to not release or pull any of the mods.
Regardless, we want to thank Chris for the time he gave to DBTech, and for being one of our brothers for the time he was with us. His contributions are appreciated.
Chris’s mods will be taken over by other members of the team and this will not affect the ongoing improvements of mods in his portfolio.
Chris was shown this statement before it was released and given the opportunity to correct anything he felt was inaccurate, or give a statement if he so wished. He declined, saying “Nah, you covered all the bases.”
None of us feel we entirely understand why Chris has chosen this course of action, and we’re all in something of a state of disbelief. His recent actions are not the actions of the Chris we know and love. Releasing this statement might not be the best thing to do from a PR standpoint, but if this situation has done anything, it has brought the rest of us closer as a family, and we feel you guys, our customers, are part of that and deserved an explanation.
Please don’t take this as some sort of call to dislike Chris. We won’t tolerate any disparagement of him. Despite recent events, he was still someone we called brother for a long time. Feel free to celebrate Chris’s time here and give him your comments below, but know that insulting him will not be tolerated.
Discuss this news here.
