In an unpublished article I started on October 15, I stated “Kerry Watson’s new article was posted today on ecommerceguide.com. You can find it at: http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/news/news/article.php/3777841 . It is entitled, “Can Iozzia Get the CRE Loaded Love Back?”. The short answer is no.”

While I still think I blew off a bit more steam than I want to publicize so quickly after Chain Reaction’s devastating implosion (or indeed – at all), events since then have made me reconsider addressing the issue in this venue though not the conclusion of my initial paragraph.  First off was the management of the all too expected eruption of steam following Sal’s “grand return” and the unbanning of a number of long time community members who were neither happy at being banned, or impressed with claims of change.  One of the most vociferous was Michael DesMarais of Supreme Center Hosting .

Mr. DesMarais’s persistence in holding a grudge does credit to his French ancestors.  His comments more than met the definition of “sharp”, but were truthful within the limits of my knowledge.  Which did not make them especially welcome to the Chain Reaction Ecommerce ™ crew.  What followed was a classic flamefest – which Michael details in a blog entry entitled “CRE tells communtiy to get F**ked” .

While I don’t support his use of the vernacular, his description of the unprofessional behavior of the Chain Reaction staff and Mr. Iozzia’s tolerance of it is pretty much correct .  This does not bode well for Chain Reaction’s future.

Not content with releasing some pressure within the community, several of the offended parties proceeded to spread their ire around the net,  in posts such as Mr. DesMarais’ blog entry cited above, and in Laura Wheeler’s blog  -  particularly her CRE Loaded’s Bad Business Example post.  This was just the beginning of the fracas.

Apparently, a number of Chain Reactions customers were contacted via email by the new 273 Loaded Project.  Mr. Iozzia’s response can be seen in the companies forums.   In the interest of preserving the content, I’ll quote it here – “

Recently we have seen some pretty disturbing counterfits of CRE Loaded. Many of you have received emails about a offering named 273 Loaded. We are not affiliated with them in any way, we have no official development communications, nor did we authorize them to contact any of our users.

While we welcome competition and forks of CRE Loaded code, we do not welcome raw re-distrobution of our commercial offerings with no added value to the store owner and no value to the community.

Typically these sites are run by people that will not give their names or official company locations or phone numbers. Anyone doing business with these kinds of people end up here on our forums later regreting it, and looking for help. Often having to pay us for legit code and support after having paid someone else as well.

Here are CRE Loaded you can get the official standard for free, here you can get community support. If you want the Pro or B2B we will glady sell it to you, and then provide you official guaranteed support. If you want to share CRE with your friends or hack it or tape the source code to a cat and make funny youtube vidoes you are welcome to do it.

Just do not attempt to misrepresent your offering as CRE Loaded. We will protect our brand, our community and our customers.

To those that find themselves hurt by such activities, contact us and we will work with you to get you going with official products and support.

To those that purpetrate such fraud under the guise of GPL, as my father often said, “I’ll give you something to blog about”.

_________________
Regards,

Salvatore Iozzia
Founder and Chief Visionary Officer (Evil Overlord)
Chain Reaction Ecommerce Inc.
Makers of CRE Loaded
Official CRE Loaded Hosting at www.chainreactionweb.com"

A look at the 273 Loaded Projects website yesterday looked more like the usual Open Source project website than a “raw re-distrobution of our commercial offerings with no added value to the store owner and no value to the community.” – and an attempt to reach the site today retuned a 509 – Bandwidth exceeded error (often a sign that the host has shut down the site, especially when seen in the early days of a month).

In the meantime, Chris at oshelpers.com, after a brief bout of harrassment from Chain Reaction lawyers appears to be gaining some support from Chain Reaction – or at least a reprieve from their Cease and Desist demands, possibly because HIS branch/expansion requires his customers to buy CRE Loaded B2B from Chain Reaction.  See Magnum MVS at oshelpers.com for details.

I found a particular resemblance to the Gleiwitz Incident in this combination of events particularly given the use of Chain Reaction’s recently discarded marketing materials and other images clearly modified from Chain Reaction Webs site in the promotion of the Magnum MVS.  This resemblance was furthered by the spate of abusive and intimidating private messages to community vendors by none other than Salvatore Iozzia.

Its all rather tedious you know.   Great amounts of time are wasted by this pompous, arrogant, egotistical tripe.   As one community member put it:

"I am not freecreloaded.com I am not 273loaded.com

Don't ask me about either I don't care...

GPL is GPL

Don't ask me what I know, I wouldn't tell you if I did

Playing these PM games is childish and stupid. Grow up.

If any osc varient needs my assistance for anything please ask,but don’t waste my time with “he said she said bs” ‘

Well said!!   That pretty much sums up our feeling on the matter.  We are here to provide persistent support for users of all osCommerce variants.   We will go to the CRE Loaded forums to do so from time to time as well because we are community members with friends there.  But we no longer much give a damn whether Chain Reaction survives or succeeds.  They’ve lost that loving feeling…

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