Category: Gentoo

This is the first of two posts. Don’t worry, they’re about different people. I’m doing this one first because it ties into the whole ancient history motif of this week’s posts.

Matt Kennedy (mkennedy) is one of my oldest online friends. I’ve known him since early in 2000 (or maybe even late ’99). He, along with Rach and Devdas (f3ew) and of course edge-op, is part of the yahoo! chat crowd. Of course, he was not mkennedy back then, he was matthewbk (and I still think of him that way). See, back in those days, I didn’t use irc (I’d used it 5 or 6 years prior) for getting in touch with linux type people. And Yahoo! had a chatroom called “Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris: 1” that served that purpose. It was in there that I did a lot of my early learning about the linux command line and shell utilities, as well as different distros (I was very much a Mandrake person back then). There was always something interesting going on — we were writing scripts and programmes, teaching each other regex subtleties, learning all about linux in faraway places.

So anyway, I was very much a private and anonymous person back then. I didn’t advertise my real name. Instead, I went with the handle “trinityneo303” which I thought was nicely anonymous. However, people shortened it to “trin” and that led to assumptions about my gender. When I finally did reveal that I was not, in fact, female, there was a vocal minority in that channel that pretty much wanted my blood for it. I’d kept my associations fairly technical up to that time (including with the four people I’ve mentioned above). Matt and Devdas were around the day that stuff went down, and they both of them fiercely defended me, earning my own lifetime loyalty and friendship in the process. See? good things happen when you’re honest!

Anyway, Matt and I were on similar tracks as far as distro-exploration. He was on Redhat, and I had been bouncing around between RedHat, Mandrake and SuSE then back to Mandrake. So, on edge-op’s encouragement, we both tried Debian for a while. I think that lasted a couple of months, but we both found it to be a little stifling. Me, I was testing a chat client that a friend of mine in LFS:1 had written in python. It required python2.1, whereas Debian unstable only had python2.0. So, I’d gotten a hold of a home-made .deb and installed it. At the next update, debian over-wrote that deb with python2.0 and I was locked into this upgrade/downgrade loop.

So I stepped over into #debian on irc (my first foray back into irc in like 7 or so years), to ask about a good way to resolve this cycle. Ten minutes in, I had a couple of people trying to grok what I was trying to do, when out of the blue, the channel op (who went by the name “jim”) asked me “why do you use Debian in the first place, anyway?” which I thought was a rather odd question. So when I responded with “why does it matter?” I guess I deserved to be kicked and banned from the channel. I do remember sending an email to some debian address that I found on the website, but got no response.

At about the same time, Matt was getting sick of his own Debian install and was looking to try one of these new source based distros we’d been hearing about. So he and I agreed to try two different ones. He would try this “gentoo” thing, and I would try “sorcerer gnu/linux” (which has its own checkered history and past that makes for some interesting reading). Anyway, I got into the install and started using it (fluxbox for the win), and I was kinda digging it. I mean the whole “casting” of “spells” out of the “grimoire” was a bit cheesy for my liking, but I was willing to overlook. It also looked like spells were fairly easy to create, so python 2.1 wasn’t looking like a big problem.

Matt, meanwhile, fell in love with Gentoo. So when we talked a few days later, we exchanged notes. He was hesitant to try Sorcerer, because Gentoo was so polished. I thought, “what the heck, I’m a distro-nomad anyway” and partitioned a disk for Gentoo (I did keep sorcerer around for a while). The first thing I noticed was how polished Gentoo was! The start-up messages had this fancy blue and green motif (as opposed to plain text on all the others I’d recently seen), etc. It had the source based thing. It had python2.1 already. Heck, it was based on python — I was getting that for free! I liked that “emerge” thing (and it wasn’t nearly as cheesy as “cast”). I thought I’d try it for a while.

Matt, meanwhile, had progressed to making ebuilds for programmes he used and enjoyed (in those days, the current directory was the portage overlay — so we tended to just create a directory in ~ for the purpose), and shared them with me. I tried to create one for the Yahoo! messenger client, but I was not very successful at it. Matt nudged me in the right directions for it, I even submitted it to bugzilla (and eventually checked it in).

Anyway, we both got really excited about Gentoo, but I started spending a lot more time in the IRC channel for it (which, again, was like paradise, especially coming from the place of banination). A few weeks later, after submitting a bunch of fixes for gnome things (nls removal stuff, mainly), Bruce Locke (blocke) recommended to Daniel that they just give me cvs access. So after a bit of back and forth, with blocke championing me, I got my very own access to Gentoo’s cvs and my brand spanking new @gentoo.org email. Oh yeah, at the time I was trinitAX on IRC (which was a shortened form of my prior /nick). Anyway, the day I became a dev, I got the operator status in the channels, and officially changed my online persona and identification to match their real world counterparts.

A few weeks into my own induction into Gentoo dev, I started campaigning hard for Matt to join (since it was he, after all, who taught me all about ebuilds in the first place!). Sure enough, they succumbed to my nagging (but mainly they saw Matt’s capability — and his willingness to handle all things java and emacs), and matt became a developer as well.

To this day, I think Matt and I have fundamental differences of opinion (I don’t _get_ emacs, so I don’t use it; and I don’t do java at all), but he’s one of my oldest online friends and one of the people most responsible for teaching me the ways of linux and gentoo, and I’ll be forever in his debt for it.

Over the years, our paths within gentoo diverged, and eventually he just lost the love for development. I can certainly understand that. I can relate to it quite closely, actually. Matt resigned many weeks ago on the -core list, and his accounts are now in infra’s hands to disable.

I’m a little emotional about him leaving. It’s like losing a link to my past. Matt, you’ll always have a friend in me, and I wish and hope for you nothing except for the very best.

I’ll end this poison talk with this final entry. Pylon has been here for 4 years now. Like he said, he’s one of the senior/older developers, so he’s seen a lot of it, too.

I want to clarify that just because infra _does_ control the button does _not_ mean that I think they’re abusive about it. Far from it. The issue is this: trust. Infra’s members have to trust each other. Implicitly. Non-infra developers have to trust infra. Implicitly. Whether we think about it consciously or not, we do place our trust in infra.

But, on to the poison! Another history lesson, this one even more personal than the last (you didn’t even think that was possible, did you?). After I joined, I quickly found my niche in Gentoo (which wasn’t fixing up Gnome packages or cleaning up USE=”-nls” installs). I started off by bug wrangling. That, in turn, gave me a deep handle on where we were understaffed and what our needs were, as a development team. That, in turn, led to recruiting developers to fill those needs. In order to do the recruiting, I had to get to know people, which was basically user-relations. Once recruited, developers (being human) might have issues with others. And that’s where developer relations came in. So, I basically built up this fairly informal structure to handle the flow of developers. My goal was to stay out of developers’ way so that they can concentrate on scratching itches.

And then my ego popped up. All of a sudden, I was the head of devRel, and effectively second in command of Gentoo itself. Power trip? Me? Well, actually, yes. One day, on the -dev mailing list (searching that thing is hard, so if anyone finds the actual post, I’ll be glad to add the link to it), someone asked a question about eclasses or dependencies or something (I don’t even remember). Well, one of the newly recruited developers answered that question. Now, the answer he gave was not completely accurate.

And that day, I turned into the type of manager/boss that I’ve despised. The right thing would have been for me to talk to the newly minted developer in private about the inaccuracy, just to make sure that he knew his facts. In other words, he didn’t do anything wrong. And really, it could have been anything from; not quite knowing some of the subtleties, to not quite expressing himself to convey those subtleties. And as a senior developer, it was for me to gently guide him towards the right knowledge and the right expression of that knowledge.

Instead, yours truly decided to tell him off *on the list.* I not only embarrassed him by doing that, I embarrassed whomever his mentor was, by asking “who mentored you?” And after clicking “Send” I thought “how did this person even make it into Gentoo without knowing this basic stuff??”
UPDATE: Thanks to Bo in the comments, here’s the link to my message. It’s embarrassing to read.

And then reality hit me. This same developer /msg’d me on IRC later to talk with me. Man, he brought my head right out of the clouds. He didn’t fight with me, he just told me the facts. He told me that he’d heard I was a bit of an ass and getting worse. He told me that people were leery to approach me with stuff because of it. He told me that I demotivated him by acting as I did on the list. He didn’t call me stupid, as I had implicitly called him. He didn’t call me dumb, as I had done to him. He just expressed the effect I’d had on him.

I can not even tell you how badly I felt. I mean, my whole life, I’ve always tried to take other people into account. I try not to step on people’s toes or to make anyone feel bad or guilty or dumb or inadequate. I try, above all, to be fair. If someone does something, I try and step into their shoes to try and understand why what happened happened, and to give them the benefit of the doubt. All the early DevRel people probably got sick of hearing me go on about second chances: “everyone,” I used to say, “deserves a second chance.” I think devrel still goes by that these days, actually.

Life’s too short to be a hard ass. Other people’s lives are too short to make them feel like crap. Yeah, you have your standards But they’re your standards. Beating other people with them won’t make anyone jump to adopt your standards. Communicating with them effectively involves showing them why your standards would serve them.

Anyway, I wanted to publicly apologise to Rob for what I did. And to anyone else I’ve made feel that way over the years: my sincerest apologies. I didn’t know it when I did it. If you’d like to vent at me (in public or private), I encourage you to do so. Don’t hold it in (don’t keep that negativity that I caused inside of you: it becomes poisonous); let it out. Give it back to me.

And with this, I’m off my soapbox, people. Thanks for reading along with me. Tomorrow’s entry: an overdue good-bye to the person who brought Gentoo into my life.

I’ve been meaning to write this post for months, actually. Maybe years. I’m likely to get quite a bit of stabby glares from all sorts of circles because of this. That doesn’t matter to me, because the truth has to be told.

Yes, people, I’m about to declothe some emperors on this one. As I indicated in the prelude posting, Ciaran is only the latest in a series of jerks As up in arms as people get about him every few months, the truth is that he isn’t what will bring Gentoo down. This will be a bit of a meandering journey through some of the jerks in Gentoo’s history.

A year ago, Ciaran’s “case” was being reviewed by some sort of devrel committee with the aim of deciding what action to take to solve the circus of issues around him. I believe (and someone please correct me, if I’m wrong) what got to devrel’s attention was the fight between Brian (ferringb) and Ciaran. Now, DevRel has never been a particularly liked team within Gentoo. And over the past few years, it has gotten undermined pretty severely (each time, its power to actually do anything decisive has been stripped gradually). A year ago was the last time that that happened, and the truth about Gentoo’s actual power structure became plainer to a few more people.

Someone in infra decided that since Ciaran’s case was up for review, he was going to be removed from Gentoo development soon anyway, so why bother with the waiting for the actual trial and review to revoke his access. Instead, it was deemed smarter to just go ahead and revoke it. Despite many logical arguments being made, emotion won out. Sort of. What infra managed to do was undermine devrel to the point of obsolescence. There’s a jerk in this story, but we’ll come back to him in a minute.

First of all, most people can read about the “golden age of gentoo” in any number of blog posts. Well, it wasn’t all that golden back then, either. There were always upset people, hurt egos, stamped on toes. But things were certainly simpler. Daniel was the buck stopper, period/full-stop. That meant that if you didn’t agree with him, you either swallowed your pride and went on, or you left, or you had an argument and/or threw a hissy fit. Or some weird combination of those things. Anyone from the period can attest to my own numerous hissy fits. Or those of Daniel’s. (We had rock-steady forces in the mix though: Grant (g2boojum), Aron (agriffis), Karl (karltk, who also provided the comedy relief), and Martin (azarah). This was a foursome who just didn’t do hissy fits. They did not get emotional. They were rational, cool, level-headed people. People to be admired and emulated.)

Anyway, Daniel was alpha male. Hey, it was his project to begin with, it made sense. But then every so often, someone would come along and vie for that position. There were episodes of threats, hissy fits, accusations, and even bribes by people who wanted the sweet sweet taste of Gentoo power.

There was the zydiot who tried to bribe his way to the top. His m/o was the following: he gave of his time and brain power to gentoo (I believe his pet term for this was “sweat equity” whatever the hell that actually means. Someone find me a powerpoint presentation about it, stat!). In return, he wanted to be able to make money for his business. How Gentoo owed him that is unclear to me. I guess the privelege of having him work on the tree (presumably on embedded things, though I don’t recall any projects actually having gotten completed) put Gentoo in the position of somehow generating business for his, er, business. Annoyingly, he would send tirades of god-knows-what emails to -core almost nightly. You’d wake up to an email with page after page after page of him going on and on and on about i-dunno-what. After a while of the incessant emails wasting time and space, and his sneaky vying for alpha-dog, I made an executive decision. I did discuss it with Daniel (in the sense that I /msg’d him and told him what I was about to do). I fired him. Yes, people, the credit for firing zach belongs to me. I’ve been hearing Daniel getting that credit (not claiming, just getting) for years now and I’m frankly sick of it. I was proud of that firing, and I think I rightly earned the recognition for it.

For reasons unknown (for which I’m willing to give Daniel the benefit of the doubt), Daniel and Zach started talking again a few months after that and Zach returned. I did issue a protest to Daniel, but like I said earlier: he was the buck-stop. Anyway, Zach was up to the same old bull when he did return. The long and the short of it is that he decided he couldn’t stay without being in control, and surely he (of all people) deserved to be in control of Gentoo. I think he offered to buy a certain percentage of Gentoo Technologies from Daniel at one point, too. He also involved lawyers in the thing, it got pretty tense and ugly. Mercifully, he forked off into that zydiot distro (I forget the name, but it sounded like zydiot), and took a good percentage of Gentoo with him. The poison purged itself, so to speak.

However, there was another poison waiting in the wings! Another one who fancied that his business credentials were more important to running a distro. He went about his power grab in a different and more subtle way (and a not so subtle way, as you’re about to learn). He decided he would “help” out with the infrastructure. And that was his way in. He took control of Gentoo’s infrastructure and formed a team of loyalists around him. Daniel no longer had access to his own stuff without Kurt’s say so (if you guessed klieber in the third paragraph, kudos to you). Kurt created a sub-culture of inherent distrust in Gentoo. The developer base was growing (fast) so in some ways, that was bound to happen anyway. And as far as system administration goes, it’s a sound principle, which is why there was very little protest when that happened.

What followed was a progressive pressuring on Daniel to “open up” the leadership of Gentoo to a managerial committee. Kurt advocated having decisions made by committee rather than just Gentoo. It would be “good for the community” or something. Rac was involved in this pressuring as well (the four of us had a meeting at LWE san francisco about it, which left me livid). Rac is an idealist, so I can forgive him for it — he probably came from a good place, even though his statement that “prominent Japanese businessmen that he knew refused to use Gentoo because it was led by one person instead of a group of people” was basically laughable. What did disturb me was his disappearance, shortly after the foundation’s birth. What he championed for so strongly he achieved. Then left the mess for everyone else to deal with — see below.

Anyway, the management structure led to even more pressure, because Daniel retained his buck-stophood. Can’t have that, can we? Kurt increased pressure: Gentoo was still owned by gentoo technologies, inc, which was owned by Daniel. It had to go to shared ownership. The pressure continued and continued and continued on. Eventually, Daniel caved (and it’s something I’ve had a hard time forgiving him for) and paved the way for the foundation to come into existence. He did what is undeniably the single worst thing he could do for Gentoo. He left it headless. There was no buck-stop. The buck-stop is a stop by committee. Congress, anyone? Need I say more?

And he left Gentoo. At the time, Gentoo was my life. It was like my child. I’d put in many hours of work and effort and emotion and sanity into building up a group of developers into kick-ass teams and keeping up morale amongst them. So, while I knew that the whole rule-by-committee was the beginning of Gentoo’s descent into Debian-hell, I stayed on because I loved Gentoo, and I would be damned if Kurt could do any more damage.

There I’ll say it again more clearly. I stayed on in 2003 to be an opposing force to Kurt on the boards and councils etc.

Back to paragraph 3, then. The truth is that it is INFRA which is the true power base of Gentoo. The council, the trustees, devrel — they’re all at infra’s mercy. Ciaran’s access revocation a year ago was just Kurt exercising his raw power (and playing on the emotional tension surrounding that situation). Since then, however, we actually have an infra team and leadership that inspires trust. Between solar, Mike (king of tacos), Robin (robbat2), Chris (wolf31o2, who’s equally amazing as the releng lead (who’s equally amazing as the GWN editor (who’s equally amazing as the head of PR))), and others, I think infra is in great hands. Once devrel and infra actually do follow policy of retiring kurt for inactivity (3 weeks shy of a year now), the poisonous personality will be gone finally.

I’m really really happy that Kurt’s professional career has been as stellar as it has been, because it has left him little to no time for Gentoo. In truth, he did fuck-all once the foundation came into being. Last I read, he said something to the effect of this (ie the board of trustees thing) being a failed experiment.

No shit, sherlock, where were you when I was saying the same thing in 2003? For what Kurt has done for Gentoo, I have nothing but negative feelings about. He was a poisonous character, but thankfully he went away.

And I’m not blameless either. There were many situations when I would think, “jeez, Daniel, just give me the reins for a month so I can fix this situation” (where “this situation” was whatever crisis we were in, of which there were many). See? Everyone wants to be alpha-dog.

The truth is that a lot of this stuff is in mailing list archives, irc logs (if there are any), and other public statements. I’ve not said anything baseless here, but if something is factually incorrect, please do leave me a comment about it.

And for any bridges that this post has burned: my sincerest apologies — it was going to happen some time, the real wonder is that I’ve managed to hold it in all this time (not counting the small number of people in whom I’ve confided over the years).

There may be a part 3 to this, I’m honestly not sure yet.

Edit: My anger got the best of me, so I removed an inaccurate statement.

Edit2: For the real scoop behind the early removal of access mentioned up there, see Lance’s comment on the matter. I tried not to imply that Kurt was the decision-maker, but the overall tone of this article probably makes that challenging for the reader to properly discern. So, formally, Kurt was not the one who pulled Ciaran’s access, he simply put himself in front of infra as its spokesman and shield (a rather admirable thing to do for your team).

I’ve been unmotivated to write any entries for the past couple of months, because I’ve spent a lot of energy on my personal/professional life, and that took a lot of time. In summary, I’m doing contract/consulting work for a while back at Brontes with my old office-mates. It’s been 3 weeks doing that, and it has been real fun. It’s felt like a homecoming, in a way. I’ll blog more about it later. Let’s first get to the poisonous jerks who are gangrenes.

The gentoo-dev mailing list has seen a lot of activity in the past couple of days. The noise-to-signal ratio has been pretty much infinite. The thread starts with kingtaco’s request for a status update on the package manager spec. The usual suspect (is there ever any other with the ability to rile so many people up?) at work here: one Ciaran McCreesh.

The story is the same. You have someone who’s super smart at technical things. Ciaran probably truly believes that his posts are technical. He may not even see that he comes off like a jack-ass more than half the time (settle down, fanboys). I’ve been observing his behaviour in this most recent thread, and I’ll be perfectly frank: he is an asshole, most of the time. He brings a double standard to the table: it’s NOT acceptable for you to make a mistake, and if you do, you need to apologise repeatedly. He, himself, is above making mistakes. And if he makes one, he is above acknowledging such trivialities. Apologies? Those are what other people do. If you say something, you better be prepared to highlight the relevant syllables in the relevant words of the relevant sub-clauses in the relevant paragraphs of the relevant subsections of the relevant chapters of the relevant documentation. If he says something, you better be happy with “go look it up.” Of course there are no personal attacks _from_ him. Those only exist in this world in one direction: _to_ him (see above about apologies). And finally, he’s happy taking something that’s partly applicable to a small part of a group of people and paint the entire group with that brush. Don’t you even THINK about painting him so broadly (see above about the relevant documentation!).

And so, this poisonous behaviour has been a fixture of Gentoo for a number of years. Is he technically proficient, even superior? I don’t think you’ll find dissent there. The point that most people make is that that is not a currency exchange for bad behaviour. And they are right, it is not. The fact is that the gentoo-dev mailing list is a community. A community is made up of people. Thus, to be a part of that community, is by necessity to interact with the people in it. There is a fair number of people who look beyond all his vitriol to his technical merits. But those are not the people with whom he has a problem. It’s the other x% of the population.

It’s a waste of time, you see, to question him on any of the things he does or says. It’s perfectly fine, however, for you to waste your own time gathering all the evidence to lay at his feet because you said something (that he may even agree with). And, every week, there’s someone who plays right into his hands. And every week someone else gets frustrated.

The above paragraphs are after a tiring, frustrating day where all I’ve been dealing with is tired, frustrated developers about Ciaran. I’m trying my best to be objective on this.

Ciaran is not the devil incarnate. I don’t think he is inherently evil, or inherently out to derail anyone who is not part of his circle of approved people. Rather, I think a number of factors are at play. The root factor is a mystery to me — his behaviour as a developer changed from when he first became a dev to the day he got kicked out. It’s a night and day thing. He retained his sarcasm. But his cynicism increased by orders of magnitude. And with that, the way he addressed people changed.

Most people, when they get kicked out of a project, go away. He did not. To his credit, he stayed, and still is very generous with the products of his labours. He gives back to Gentoo, a lot of good, strong technical stuff. The PMS, when it is done, I have full confidence will be a rock-solid document. The devmanual that was his intiative is a good example of such rock-solidity. Paludis as a complete independently developed package manager is another good example of his capabilities. In all three cases, I’ll note that he’s not the soloist. That he has a lead role in all three is without question, though. And the people who work with him on those projects display a fierce loyalty to him.

So obviously, he knows how to interact in a respectful and civil manner. One can only assume that he chooses not to. Is it a lead-role thing? Could be, I don’t know. Is it a personal issue he has in real life? Could also be, I don’t know. I’ve never met him in person. Those who have seem to come away with a fairly pleasant impression of him. Whenever I have worked with him in gentoo development, I have come away with a favourable impression of him. While I like him on a personal level, I can’t help but shake my head in frustration at his antics on the mailing lists.

The long and the short of it is that there are calls for silencing him on the mailing list by banning him. As tactless, jerky, dickheady, half-truthy, vague as he gets on the list, I don’t think that that is the way to solve “the ciaranm problem.” I’m not alone in my belief that trolls should not be fed. Thus, if you perceive him to be trolling, don’t take the bait. Trolls feed off the attention they get (and ciaran certainly does, too), so the best thing to do is to not give them any. Banning him also does not change the culture that gentoo dev has adopted.

Numerous times just today, people have preferred to assume the worst in others, and proceeded to attack them. The name-calling results shortly thereafter. The real gangrene is that culture that enables this sort of behaviour, the one that tolerates that one dev can insult another (“dickwad”, “dickhead”, “fuckwad” are examples that immediately come to mind), blaming that developer for not doing *exactly the thing that they did*. Mercifully, that particular poisonous individual left the project. Yet, he should have faced consequences. He behaved reprehensibly and then walked away, with nary a consequence. He should have been kicked (there were multiple instances of that sort of abuse from him)!

And yes, he was part of the larger ciaranm circle of people, but that is besides the point.

What is not besides the point is that Gentoo developers every day continue to be rude, disrespectful, insulting, and back-stabbing with each other and users, and there are no corrective measures taken.

I submit to you, my fine Gentoo readers, that the culture of gentoo is what needs to change. These sorts of behaviours should not be tolerated, and their perpetrators disavowed. Not as a matter of policy, bureaucracy and red-tape, but as a matter of common human decency.

In part 2 I will endeavour to trace how this culture got to where it is.

So, after about a year or so of using the various gtk2-based forks of XMMS, someone in #gentoo-dev recently recommended rhythmbox. This is a sucky post because I can not even remember why I was asking for alternatives in there. I think it was because I was lamenting that audacious doesn’t play my last.fm streams.

Anyway, whoever that person was is now my hero. I love that it’s a music management application as well. OK, I just went to my public last.fm page, as linked above, and um, wow. I did not realise I’ve listened to that much Michael Jackson lately. Actually, I did not realise that rhythmbox was interfacing with last.fm constantly to report that, either. So, in the few minutes it’s taken to write this post, I like it even better.

I realise that rhythmbox is something to get used to (it took me a bit), and that it’s not a straight up replacement for the xmms type applications (nor am I trying to sell it in this post as such). I’m only expressing my own appreciation for it. It also seems to be firmly a gnome application, so that limits the potential audience for it.

I’m filing this in the “me too” advertising section (when I get around to having such a section). So, there’s some US wireless carrier called Alltel which launched this new cool feature that lets you call up to 5 of your friends/family on other networks for free. They call this feature “My Circle,” which is nice and catchy.

And of course, within weeks, you can’t walk through a mall without hearing about T-Mobile’s response, which they’ve cleverly and originally dubbed “My Faves” which allows you to, guess what, call up to 5 of your friends/family on other networks for — you guessed, free.

So here’s a kudos to Alltel for calling out T-Mobile’s “look mommy, I can do what he does” strategy. It’s quite a hilarious response, actually, in that it shows how effortlessly they have the upper hand. My Circle has expanded to 10 of your friends. Just like that. And, their new advertising spots point this out.

Come on, T-Mobile. You guys came to the US a few years ago and took it by storm. You were the first widely known GSM networked wireless provider, you had cool phones, you put hottie Cathy Zeta-Jones in your advertising spots. They were edgy, you were set apart. And you know what? That got me: hook, line and sinker. Verizon was probably a cheaper option, but between the image I had of T-Mobile just being cool, man, and the fact that you offered GSM, Aimee and I signed up to your family plan (with a one year contract).

And I’ll tell you why you’re going to lose us soon. Our phones are fairly outdated, so we’re looking for new phones. For starters, the current line up of phones is somewhat underwhelming. To be honest, I’m not sure if we can even renew our one-year-plan. We’re basically “off-plan” at the moment, which actually suits us fine. However, if we’re to get phones at good deals, we’d have to sign up for a plan. Except, we’d be locked in for two years.

So this gets me thinking. I like GSM, so Sprint/Nextel and Verizon are out. Alltel (see above) is definitely cool but they’re CDMA as well (and they don’t offer any plans in Massachusetts anyway). This leaves us with Cingular. For ten bucks a month more, we get a buttload of extra monthly minutes, with unused ones getting carried over into the next month. Yeah, we lose out on your original MyCircle (couldn’t your marketing flunkies have at least thought up something original, for crying out loud? Did you give them a raise for the blatant copy-catting?). But that’s ok, because most everyone we know is on Cingular, with a small minority on Verizon. And you know something? Cingular just has cooler phones.

That’s just how we’re inclined so far. If OpenMoko does actually get released in the next couple of months I’ll pick one up (maybe two) and that criterion for carrier selection just goes away. Which leaves us with feature comparisons, and I think the minutes-carrying-over plus the lesser amount of dropped calls (this is actually claimed by everyone we know who’s on cingular) will probably win us away.

In short, T-Mobile do a couple of things: get both your marketing and product planning/management departments to pull up their socks and start innovating again. Stop following (or at least don’t be so bloody blatant about it) and start leading (again). We both know you’re capable of it.