Did anyone here doing UD get notified of the switch?
Uh no... but there's a messy issue that came up in discussions that I participated in last year - whether here, at Ars, or on UD's forums - and that was the fact that there were at least 2 different clients made available for running the project. The client downloaded from Intel was configured to ONLY run the Cancer Project whereas the one downloaded from UD would run the gamut of projects. Unfortunately, this info was not clearly communicated to the masses...
Thus, those who thought that what they had would be dedicated to Cancer Research, found that their client thought otherwise. And in the early days last year, there was no ability to "opt out". And when the opt-out option was put in place, then you had the potential to unknowingly rotate processor time within categories, although opted out of say the commercial projects.
The last I heard, you can now opt-out within the category.
Even though I have been running the project on one machine for almost a year and have contributed 380 results (237 days -I temporarily shut it down to get some extra SETI results in during this network crunch... ), I have and will continue to complain about the way this thing was promoted, the encouragement by the UD staff, Intel, and even project participants, to play on the emotions of those who have experienced Cancer first hand (and for those participants who did so, shame on you for not seeing the forest for the trees. ), the lack of Oxford participation in the large Team DC forums, and other things.
If you read that Inquirer article carefully, you'll see mention that Oxford is shocked that UD/Intel suddenly considers the project complete. Yet is Leukemia "cured" as the whole marketing hype promoted? I think not.
Ho hum.
I hate to say that Oxford was too lacsidaiscal (at least in the U.S.) about the whole thing from day one and shouldn't be surprised that they're being shunted aside for something more monetarily meaty.