Just out of curiosity what is (was) the policy/licensing concerning widgets uploaded by developers. I assume there was some kind of license agreement that detailed developers' rights and chumby inc's rights pertaining to usage of widgets provided by outside developers. On a similar note, considering there seems to be some kind of "gray area" regarding licensing and third party widgets and availability of these third party widgets, is it possible for you to (and/or would you be willing to) provide the community with the chumby inc-created widgets?

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Cool. Thanks for your commitment to the users, Duane. Others would have just bailed where you have persisted.

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I appreciate the limitations you are working with and have admiration for what you have accomplished.

Would it be possible to email all the widget authors and ask them to upload the source code for widgets to a location (e.g. sourceforge?) to preserve them. If emailing the owners is an issue, I have an email program that will email individual letters based on an excel spreadsheet or database. I would be happy to work with you on this.

The maturity with which you are approaching this, gives me confidence for the future. While I'm hopeful that something approaching the original version would be restored, I also want the reassurance of a backup plan.

This is not an iPhone or eBook reader - the widgets are not "download and saved" on the device in the sense you're probably used to.  They are "streamed", and at best cached for technical efficiency only.  They are not "removed from the device" since they're not really there.  The caching behavior does not change the author's ownership rights.

Until 2012, there were only cached in RAM - they went away when you turned off the device.

The author's rights under "black-letter" copyright law mean that they own them outright and any additional rights granted must be explicit - and they have not granted the rights for you to keep them, only licensed them for use under the TOS.

Again, I will change it so there are other options for authors to choose if they wish.

I think we have to distinguish between the rights Chumby Industries got from the authors and the rights an individual user got. You have a very good insight to the first one, I fully agree that you need to make sure to be on the legally safe side before you offer anything for download.

The situation is different for the individual user who made a backup for personal use of the widgets for the possible event that Chumby industries went down forever. You wrote that the authors have not granted the rights for me to keep them and only licensed them for use under the TOS. However, the widgets were freely available for download, without requiring a login and agreeing to any TOS. Making a backup to avoid damage of a system is also a good reason and legal in some countries.

Anyway, I am not interested to start a legal discussion, your and my time is to valuable for that :-)

@brendan, [del]this is like students stealing a thesis and saying it's their own, or passing it on to others. Taking people's widgets isn't an obscure legal point, it's just not an ethical thing to do. Hope you don’t stray down that path. Stay here and help keep Chumby as a community effort.[/del]

EDIT- the above was a dumb post by me. Sorry, see below.

@Materdaddy- guess I read too much into it because of the earlier comments on the thread... I just read some of his other posts and looks like you're completely right. Looks like he's really offering some nice help. Thanks for keeping me in line!

My apologies, brendan, and thanks for offering to pitch in.

@bobsz - I wouldn't want to infringe upon any developers copyright. I myself prefer things to be open source, but I do understand why some don't license as such.

@1ras - Exactly. I would love to have 1 large repo. We just need to get developers to contribute.

If anyone is willing to help work on this project I am more than willing to donate the server. I have a couple servers sitting in data-centers that could handle this very easily. I am also pretty good with code and could build a custom repository system. Let me know what if you want to get involved or donate any widgets/code you want hosted.

What do you mean "your widget repository"?  The piratebay widget repository is one of illegal copies. @brendan is wanting to set up a repository that does not infringe anyone's intellectual property rights (or at least that's how I understand his plans).

And that's what he's trying to do.

Brendan: If you could get some widgets up (maybe just Chumby Industries' and dmaxwell's (Duane's developer Chumby account), as that has a good selection and are legally owned by Duane, negating legal rights entirely) and Duane could give you his front end software for editing channels and the database, but the music sources needing a SDK key being cut out, I could see myself switching over to that. Of course, when Duane does relaunch the edited and streamlined Chumby service, maybe him and you could work out a deal where widgets are cached on his server, and the full database and widgets are on AWS. That way, if either server goes down, at least people who don't reboot still have their widgets.

I suggest that using github, sourceforge or google code or another well known repository of open source projects would promote sharing.

Some consideration would need to be given to structure for the project, but simply gathering the widgets is a great idea.