Thanks for your interest in chumby. This has more or less been answered in a previous post - http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?pid=12021#p12021

Well, the widgets all come from a service that the company operates, and I guess if the company went away, so would the servers.

However, the chumby has so many hackable software components that it's quite possible to use a chumby to do interesting things even without a connection to our servers.  The most obvious is to simply put Flash movies, including widgets, on a USB dongle and running them from there.  This is all well documented on the wiki.

There are also several people that have produced alternative firmware for the device - should we go away, I would guess that somebody would quickly publish a firmware image to replace the one in the device.  The source code for most of the firmware (everything but the Flash Player and Control Panel) is publicly posted - if you're concerned, then I'd encourage you to download that source and back in up on a CD or DVD.

Of course, the best way to reduce the possibility of our demise is to support us by buying our products.

What makes Chumby a cool product is all the great widgets avaliable to stream through it. I suspect if chumby.com is shut down all those widgets will be useless and we will be stuck in "hack your way to something" hell trying to get the same items back on the chumby via scripts and other non-total geek friendly tools.  I really think someone needs to start making a simular interface (website) like chumby.com (that will allow the same widgets to work there) so our chumbies will have a new place to call home in case chumby.com goes away one day.

So your saying all the widgets will still work without unit connecting to Chumby.com?? Hmm..

Serving the widgets from another host than chumby.com shouldn't be that tricky. I serve all the widgets I use from the local webserver strait on the chumby without having internet connection at all. It's basically just a hand full of (rather simple) xml-files that are requested by the controlpanel.

Well, if we go away, the Flash Player doesn't magically disappear from the product, since it's built into the firmware.  It's a perfectly functional Flash Lite 3 player, and there's nothing about it that's tied in any way to chumby.com.

There's also a full, complete Control Panel built into the device, just a few versions back form the one that's downloaded. You can launch it and point it to an entirely different server besides chumby.com if you like, just use:

chumbyflashplayer.x -i /usr/widgets/controlpanel.swf -dbaseURL=http://ip.of.main.site -dwidgetsURL=http://where.widgets.come.from

You could also simply create a hosts file redirecting the chumby.com domains. Of course, any alternative server would have to understand the XML-based protocols that the Control Panel uses - as pointed out elsewhere, they're pretty simple and straightforward.  Chances are, however, that an alternative service would implement a different protocol.

In order to host the existing widgets, the operator of this alternative service would have to get explicit permission from the authors of the widgets to redistribute them.

Crap, now I wont be able to sleep tonite worrying about Chumby's untimely demise

Heh well my Chumby is by my bed so at least I will have something to look at while I cant sleep.

In any case I am impressed with your patience and self control while answering posts on this board in a civil manner.