I'm sure it's news everywhere by now, but the main discussion appears to be happening over at Joho the Blog where Dave Winer is among the long list of commentators on the news of the surprise shutdown of the blogs hosted at weblogs.com.

While I do know how impossible it is to contact members of a service you might run, especially when you have no budget or much time to alert them, the only comment I would throw on the fire is that, hey, this is Dave Winer -- if he'd posted anything at all on his blog (and in a robot-readable format) it would have been top news within minutes, enough for all friends of friends of weblogs bloggers to spread the alert far and wide of any immanent shutdown. Nobody likes bad news as a surprise, especially when it affects their property.

Yes, their property -- Dave maybe owned the server and it's his discretion to close it, but the authors of those blogs are what built it into the major force, they lent Dave their content and that built his reputation. It's like bandshell shows where the guy who picks up the trash gets paid but not the musicians: They paid for that service with their devotion to producing the content, and that's worth something, it's worth at least a note to say, "sorry my friends, but I can't do it any more." and even if that's just a note on the blog.

If there's anything that we can do within reason to help. But understand that I'm moving on June 30th and my life is in sort of an upheaval state. This is not a company here. This is a person. So, to expect company-type service is un.. well, it isn't going to happen.

To say it's a free service as if it excuses it, sorry, that's a cop-out. When you give a gift, it's given, not lent -- even a nasty landlord will give an eviction notice -- among the volunteer service organizations, we say that if you sign up to volunteer, you sign up to volunteer; it's no longer a favour it is an obligation, others depend on you. If you can't stand the heat, you stay out of the kitchen, and if you can't do the volunteer work, don't announce it at showtime, announce it as soon as you know you can't meet your obligations. I know Dave's no fan of the opensource gift economy, but let's not make the mistake here: Money is not the only way to measure worth ... or obligation.

dangerous precidents

Our excusing a rudeness by saying, "hey, you didn't pay for it!" is a dangerous precident; we go down a very sad road if that becomes the acceptable protocol. Even peace keeping troups are expected to behave. When Julian Bond wanted to discontinue RSSify, he honourably peppered the free feeds with warnings, and before he went offline there were plenty of offered alternatives well known to his users. When I was hosted on the experimental free DragonFire, the owner warned us when his research project was sold to a commercial company, and warned us again when the commercial company was losing interest in the free-hosting service.

As a personal choice, as one last gift of courtesy, Julian and DragonFire did the right thing and showed some respect to those who had come to depend on them. They didn't see those free-service users as free-loading leeches who take what they are given, they saw them as friends, and we owe something to our friends when we must disappoint them. Sure you can't sue anyone for retracting uncontracted volunteer service, and even most commercial EUAs reserve the right to pull out without notice, but it's just the right thing to do, and whether it's a webservice we host or a favour we do for a neighbour, a little common courtesy is not only a good idea, it's the right thing to do.

While those hosted on weblogs.com have been polite and understanding is wonderful and fortunate, if I ever find myself in Dave's shoes, I'd think it only fair to give fair warning, if only because that is the sort of world I want online and the world we want always starts with ourselves and our own actions, if only because it seems like a good Golden Rule.

With weblogs.com, even Dave's subscribers heard about it second hand, and they were left to fumble around in the dark to find out what's happened, and then had to go to Jeneane for the transcript -- my (commercial) webhost has done similar things to people over quota or causing trouble (such as when MT goes berzerk) with the excuse "it's easier to answer telephones than to send out warnings"; sadly, living in this early 21st century western industrialized world where telco operators find saying "Thank You" wasted too much time-money, I have come to expect the cold and impersonal from corporate entities. Must we now come to expect this of the web too?

remembering our netiquette

This is not the first time, of course, but I hope the mass acceptance is not the precident for our free web service traditions. For example, we got much the same from DayPop during that early episode where the owner had to move; it went down, gone and vanished without trace and only later did the blog appear to explain -- I actually got the real story not from the DayPop blog, but from people who knew the author and posted the fate of the service on their own blogs. Even here, DayPop had a good excuse as his server melted while the owner was away, the collapse was unintended and unscheduled.

But surely even Dave could have told someone who could be so kind as to leak the news in advance of the shutdown. It's not like it was a component failure, or he was afraid of any lost revenue or plummeting stock price or anything. He must have at least thought about closing up the service.

It's just a matter of common courtesy, isn't it?

That said, kudos to Dave for doing his very best on the damage control and his commitment to help, he's making sure nothing is lost, and offering to give people their archives. That's way more than you'd get if your average commercial ISP went down with your website and email archives. Thanks as well from this non-subscriber for having done what you did in the first place Dave, in bringing a fresh sense of diversity and polyculture to this impoverished media. That was a gift that is not going to be going away, and you've been a major shaker in that.

Nonetheless, if you ask me, Dave is ironically having to take far more time, stress and worry to explain himself, and to explain to non-subscribers at that, than it maybe would have taken to just do the right thing in the first place; while this episode is over and what's done is all done spilled milk under the bygones bridge, let's just hope the rest of us have learned something from it.