Actually I'm kinda curious about the legalities.  Obviously just going ahead and re-distributing Pandora or Twitter Inc's software would be a terrible idea.  But: did chumby's widget submission process involve giving them an exclusive license?  If not, if the widget authors themselves wanted to make them publicly available they certainly could.

(I have a friend or two at Pandora, and I am going to see if I can't get them to bless a closed-source standalone distro of their widget...)

By agreeing to the Chumby TOS, widget authors granted the company nonexclusive rights to redistribute the widgets.

The rights are assignable under certain limited circumstances - an acquisition of the service, or the special circumstances under which the Sony service split was done.

Someone else that's completely independent of Chumby wanting to redistribute the widgets would have to obtain those same rights from the authors.

About a quarter of the widgets belong to Chumby itself.

Pandora is covered by a contract with Chumby - to continue that would require some entity that's capable of negotiating and entering a similar contract.

Amen to that.

I would personally be supportive of releasing pretty much everything as Open Source, such as the Control Panel and server code.  It would probably need to be scrubbed first of certain things that are covered by contract (ie API keys, etc.) but in principle it's quite possible.

There is actually only one piece of code in the device that Chumby cannot theoretically release source code for, and that's the Adobe Flash Lite Player.

However, the only people that can authorize a source code release are the Chumby trustees.  I don't have that authority - at this point, I'm not very different than you in terms of rights, since I'm no longer an employee.

The stuff I (and a few other people) have been doing for the last few months has been purely maintenance of the assets to the status quo - I cannot do anything that materially changes them without permission.

In other words, I've been simply continuing, to the best of my ability, what Chumby would have normally been doing at the time the trustees took control - helping users with problems with their accounts, registering and deregistering devices, etc.  Not all support emails have gone unanswered - things I *can* do I've done.

There are normal operating functions that I *can't* do - for instance, I have no access to the inventory of devices, so folks with apparently bad power supplies or SD cards (the vast bulk of the "physical" problems people are having, but fortunately not the larger fraction of total problems) are not supportable by me.

Things like releasing more source code is something I *can't* do, as much as I'd like to, since I don't own it except for my own 50 or so widgets.

We do have a plan for a peer-to-peer version of the Chumby ecosystem, that would allow the propagation of widgets without any dependency upon the back end services - sort of like zurk's system but more sophisticated in that authors could still publish widgets and users could manage them from their devices.  That actually is something we could do *without* Chumby's permission, as zurk has done - but it's a matter of finding the time to do it.

Is that at least still theoretically distributable as-is?  (I'm guessing "no" and "ha ha ha no" from the complete lack of download/licensing info on adobe's site about embedded/lite flash, but I guess I could be surprised.)

Alternatively... gnash?  Although I always sorta assumed that if gnash had been anywhere near production-ready you would have been long since using it.