CEON Relaunch - Conor's family seeking assistance

[Neil Kerr_Ceon]

Hi,

My name is Neil Kerr and I am Conor Kerr’s younger brother.

As I’m sure quite a few of you will know, Conor was the founder of Ceon and a devoted member of the Zencart community. Ceon was Conor’s pride and joy and right up until the day of his passing, he spent 7 days a week, pretty much 52 weeks of the year, working on his software and supporting every customer who needed assistance.

Since the untimely and devastating loss of Conor, our family has been trying to ensure that his work lives on in memory, in particular, of the countless hours he spent ensuring that he was writing high quality code whilst quietly and bravely battling a serious illness.

Having been approached on the day of Conor’s Funeral by the then owner of JSWeb, we were assured that Conor’s hard work and ethical method of conducting his business would be honoured if we were to allow JSWeb to help handle Ceon.

Within a short period of time we became aware of several disquieting facts which were not in keeping with the ethics of Conor's business. At a later date JSWeb was acquired by a new owner, a transition that we knew nothing about. This seemed odd to say the least, given that Ceon modules formed part of the JSWeb income. We soon found ourselves in the position of having our percentage from each module substantially cut whilst JSWeb, without any permission from ourselves, hiked the prices of Conor’s modules and added annual fees.

These actions left us horrified and shocked. Alongside being hugely talented and passionate about Ceon, Conor was also an extremely fair and honourable business owner. We felt that Ceon could no longer be affiliated with JSWeb. For close to a year and a half Conor’s hard work has been lining the pockets of people who had no involvement in the origin of the modules.

Determined to honour Conor my mother and father flew to different locations and eventually we uncovered developers who agreed to help us maintain Conor's work.

A Github was established and we could see that amendments were progressing and modules were being updated. However, last year communication ceased and we found ourselves back at square one. It has been a hugely frustrating, hurtful and in all honesty quite heart breaking experience to watch Conor’s beloved Ceon start to fade away as others seem to be trying to capitalise on his years of hard work and dedication.

I am here asking for help from the forum to get Ceon back up and running asap. We have secured the services of a very dependable and enthusiastic person, who has been working on reassembling the Ceon site. We are hoping to retrieve the updated code from the developers who had been working on it in 2016, in the hope that we can get Conor’s modules back up where they belong.

I suppose what I was hoping was that a small group of Zencart developers might be able to rally round and help us achieve our aims for Conor. We have always been happy and willing to reward those involved and with your help maybe we will finally realise this in the not too distant future.

Many thanks for your time,

Neil Kerr
Ceon

[badarac]

Hi Neil,
I knew Conor (through zencart and email) and he was a true gentleman and everything else you said. I miss our chats and it was a true loss. I have made available changes to the Advanced Shipper module for customers that had purchased the module from Conor. That module was released under the GPL and his documentation was released with a copyright. I wish you would consider releasing the documentation under the GPL and allow the module to be enhanced by the zencart community. That would allow Conor's memory to live on and that excellent module to continue to be enhanced. It of course would need to be brought up to date at the 5.02 level which was where JSWEB started and added the annual license.

[dbltoe]

Ditto. Conor was always gracious and helpful. Apologetic if he felt he was not completely helpful and diligent in making sure his products were of the utmost quality.
We were communicating right up to his passing and he never used illness as an excuse to "beg off" on work. He and his abilities are sorely missed in this community.
I believe I can state with certainty that Conor would not like the turn that his developed software took after his passing.
Anything that I can do to assist a Ceon rebirth would be just a small payback for what he has done for Zen Cart.

[torvista]

Hi Neil, welcome and what a relief it is to hear from you at long last.

I too was often in touch with Conor and don't mind admitting I burst into tears at the shock of reading the post of his passing, scaring the life out of my family sat next to me!

It has long pained me to see his contributions (that STILL have no peers in terms of quality of code AND documentation) were in danger of fading away.
I maintain an updated CEON URI mapping on Github just to keep it alive.

I am sure there is no shortage of goodwill here towards Conor and yourself but I am not clear exactly what you are hoping to achieve - reassert the commercial modules as paid modules as before, but now supported by people here, or offer the whole lot as open source to keep the name alive?

best regards
Steve

[apogeerockets]

Welcome, Neil. I'm glad you and your mum are getting things back on track. I have done some tweaks on the admin side of the BIS for the company I work for, and would be glad to offer those contributions for review, if you guys so desire.

[picandnix]

Welcome, Neil. I'm glad you and your mum are getting things back on track. I have done some tweaks on the admin side of the BIS for the company I work for, and would be glad to offer those contributions for review, if you guys so desire.

I'd imagine there are many folks that would appreciate any improvements

[Neil Kerr_Ceon]

Thanks to everyone who has gotten in touch both here and via PM, we hugely appreciate the support. Please do keep it coming and keep your eyes peeled for the Ceon relaunch, we are working hard to keep Conor's legacy alive.

Thank you,
Neil

[schoolboy]

Thanks to everyone who has gotten in touch both here and via PM, we hugely appreciate the support. Please do keep it coming and keep your eyes peeled for the Ceon relaunch, we are working hard to keep Conor's legacy alive.

Thank you,
Neil

I too shed more than one tear on hearing of Conor's passing all those years ago. He helped me on numerous occasions. In almost every respect, Conor was unique amongst opensource coders, and his dedication to the zencart effort was (and remains) substantial.

My thoughts on how to both respect Conor's legacy and preserve his contributions are based on the man's vision and ethics.

Conor offered many of his fantastic modules for sale (at ridiculously low prices, given what they did for functionality) and I am 100% behind any effort to re-commercialise CEON. There is a moral imperative to help Conor's family and the latent commercial potential in his work deserves this respect.

The challenge is in finding people that have the level of skill needed to maintain the quality of the original work. Such people are rare, and because they are rare, they are valuable, and can command premium rates.

But within the ZC community we have many talented people - and I include the developer team as well.

Perhaps the talented developers (some of whom have worked on CEON updates already) could look at forming a "consortium" of consultants.

I believe a "contract" of some kind would be needed to cement the agreements on how developers work, and how they are paid fr it.

Ceon's family can retain control of the CEON web presence and draw on the "consortium's" members to keep the modules fresh and up-to-date.

Consortium members could be paid - either through a performance-related retainer, or on a % of each module sale.

By linking the payment to developers, to the actual sale (much like how an affiliate selling network operates), any money paid out is a process of cash-flow.

In this way, CEON is under the control of Conor's family, the modules are kept fresh, and the people who keep them fresh earn a bit of cash for their efforts, from actual sales.

[DigitalShadow]

hope something good comes of this

[picandnix]

hope something good comes of this

https://ceon.net is open for business (I've used it (Ceon Advanced Shipper)).