Release early, release often is great when products released under that philosophy are labeled correctly.
Facebook's API does not have the typical warning labels about shifting API calls, development releases, or technology previews; these are the final, real versions, and they're expecting people to just roll with it when they whimsically decide to rename an API call or database field. If you expect people to just roll with that kind of thing, that's cool, but you have to provide fair warning -- you can't just recruit tens of thousands of corporations to use your software and then go making API-breaking changes willy-nilly.
The open-source community, where _all_ development at every stage usually occurs out in the open, takes stability, etc., very seriously. It's good and important that early versions of software are available, but they're tagged as such; ext4 had been in a stabilized "experimental" mode for the last two years or so, and it was relatively stable during that. Very early work on Firefox is available, but it's not pushed out until it has a year or so to mature, and it's billed as alpha and beta, despite the fact that the Fx 3 betas were rock solid, as are the 3.1s. When KDE released 4.0, they gave everyone fair warning: despite the name, it was still an experimental platform and release.
This is serious business. There's nothing wrong with releasing early and releasing often and sharing your contributions and collaborating -- that's good, and would probably help Facebook a lot if they would take it to heart. The bad thing here is that Facebook is actively promoting and encouraging new users to adopt this platform for incorporation into live, production-level applications, and then breaking the API and engaging in other assorted mischief without notice. That's horrible. :(
Facebook's API does not have the typical warning labels about shifting API calls, development releases, or technology previews; these are the final, real versions, and they're expecting people to just roll with it when they whimsically decide to rename an API call or database field. If you expect people to just roll with that kind of thing, that's cool, but you have to provide fair warning -- you can't just recruit tens of thousands of corporations to use your software and then go making API-breaking changes willy-nilly.
The open-source community, where _all_ development at every stage usually occurs out in the open, takes stability, etc., very seriously. It's good and important that early versions of software are available, but they're tagged as such; ext4 had been in a stabilized "experimental" mode for the last two years or so, and it was relatively stable during that. Very early work on Firefox is available, but it's not pushed out until it has a year or so to mature, and it's billed as alpha and beta, despite the fact that the Fx 3 betas were rock solid, as are the 3.1s. When KDE released 4.0, they gave everyone fair warning: despite the name, it was still an experimental platform and release.
This is serious business. There's nothing wrong with releasing early and releasing often and sharing your contributions and collaborating -- that's good, and would probably help Facebook a lot if they would take it to heart. The bad thing here is that Facebook is actively promoting and encouraging new users to adopt this platform for incorporation into live, production-level applications, and then breaking the API and engaging in other assorted mischief without notice. That's horrible. :(