I don't think there's been a date mentioned, but it has been pretty publicized that chumby is basically done for now.  A private equity firm is holding the assets trying to sell them and the ~30 Chumby employees have all(?) been hired by Technicolor.

@rkt88edmo, simpfeld... There have been posts exactly like yours going back to January, when there were some business changes. Some users thought "the end" was a matter of days or weeks... now it's been 6 months. Even that link you posted from zurk is 3 months old. People have been making backup systems so Chumbys will run if the servers go down for any reason. Skim the topics in "Chumby the Device" and you'll see people have made offline firmware for USB sticks, and other innovations. There certainly is no Apocolypse happening here. But there sure has been a lot of evolution and community development and innovation. You can search for some of my past topics when I was in total panic because I had no tech background to set up these backup systems. Forum members did a lot of teaching to us "slower" ones.

Do some forum searches and read what zurk developed with help from others. He did a lot fast- back in April he predicted Chumby.com would be down within a few weeks. Also search for Francesco's posts, as he also developed a really good tool. Also skim other forum topics for related discussions, such as Widgets and Chumby.com. There's a lot of great info to be learned in there.

Duane is our remaining Chumbian, and Doktor Jones has been acting as a volunteer moderator, both fielding a lot of problems. But zurk's stuff is really his own thing, not made by Chumby, and he hasn't posted here in a while. Some of the info he and others wrote about here may be outdated. If you click on his download links, you'll be getting a version 18. He has a link to his Sourceforge "offline firmware" forum at the start of his posts. I'd suggest checking there to read his latest changelogs and readmes, and possibly ask him questions- if you go that way.

If you have any other specific questions, there's still a lot of us here to answer your questions- though it seems everything's already answered someplace in the forum. It'll just take a lot of reading. But remember that this is "old news" to most of us, so some of the meatiest posts are probably back around February March, and April. Don't panic. Chumby's more of a community effort now, and we believe in the users.

I wish you guys all the best.  You in particular Duane have been awesome for us chumbiites.  I of course am hoping the chumby servers never go dark, but I realize that's a fantasy.  I've got two units and I love them... great devices that have provided lots of entertainment over the past couple of years... thanks again for your support.... Aaron