I agree. When something is “free” you are always paying in some other way – giving up personal information, looking at advertising or, as in this case, taking a risk on the service going away.

I can understand how people got upset at the service going away with no notice, but they can’t really blame Dave. One of the problems with the Internet is you don’t always know who is behind the free stuff – Hotmail has Microsoft behind it, so it probably won’t just “go away”, weblogs.com had basically one guy – but there is no way to tell this by just looking at the site