Joe,

Good to hear that this doesn't affect the further development, improvement and support of the Community Platform.
Maybe the corporation can be more open about the future of the community platform in relation to Evoq.
How many employees of the corp are working on the Community platform and on what base. Or does the community version fully depend on the community contributors. Who are the employees that will replace Charles and Cathal?

I think this would reassure a lot of community users to stay with DNN and not move to another CMS (wordpress, umbraco, drupal etc.)

I assume the departure of charles and Cathal doesn't affect the release of DNN 8 RC1 today and the final release on 01/14/16?

 Thanx!

Tony,

  Shaun was an exception to the rule and for good reason.  Shaun holds a special place in DNN as it's original creator and leader for many years.  If you consider that we didn't announce departures of Nik Kalyani and Scott Willhite who were both co-founders, and we didn't announce the departures of many other community members like Chris Hammond, Will Strohl and several others, then the way we handled the departures of Charles and Cathal is consistent with how previous departures were handled.  In fact if you look back over the history of the Open Source project, we have not been in the habit of announcing departures of key community members either.  Dan Caron is arguably one of the best architects who worked on DNN and his decision to move on was made in private and people understood that. 

We are very appreciative of all the effort that every community member and employee has made to DNN and DNN Corp over the years.  We would not have achieved the level of success we have without all of their hard work and dedication.  But the decisions behind why people leave the company or the community are often decisions made in private and we want to be respectful to the employees and community members by allowing them to determine how much or how little they want to disclose about the departure.