Hmmm. I'm a bit puzzled by this thread. Not sure where the disconnect lies.
Our license is supposed to be clear that you can hack your chumby and point it anywhere you like, not exclusively to our servers. A user pointing his chumby to his own local area network (or locally-connected storage, like a USB thumbdrive) is specifically called out as an area of total freedom where he absolutely doesn't have to pay Chumby Industries a dime. Likewise pointing a chumby to any site on the Internet that isn't a "Consumer Content Network," i.e., what Chumby does to make money. So, for example, pointing to a site that monitors an enterprise's server status or, alternatively, a site that monitors a medical patient's blood pressure.
All we ask is that if you hack your chumby to point to another "Consumer Content Network" on the Internet, i.e., a site that could potentially compete directly with Chumby Industries, that you also enable your modified chumby to still point to Chumby's own Network. In other words, you absolutely *can* modify your chumby device to point elsewhere on the Internet, *even* to a site potentially competing with ours. All we ask in this case is that you don't eliminate or disadvantage us in that process. The Chumby Network is in fact how Chumby Industries makes money when we're selling hardware as aggressively as we can.
And, btw, the license hopefully makes it crystal clear that we're not talking about widgets. Any widgets you create, you own -- full stop. By posting them on our Network, you simply grant us a license to distribute them -- which is really the point of the Network and I would think presumed by the act of posting them there in the first place.
I don't know whether this clarifies things any more than the actual license was supposed to do, but hopefully gives more context? In any event, feel free to post further questions/issues or even email me at stomlin@chumby.com if you'd like. We definitely want developers to be excited about hacking and modifying the chumby and developing and sharing widgets over the Chumby Network. If we still haven't gotten the license right, in your opinion, please let us know.