Why undersell?

In his latest post
Aq. talks about two new directions for the LugRadio offspring Jokosher of which both sound excellent.

However he mentions the release schedule for Jokosher:

the development of a plugin system is on the roadmap for Jokosher 0.2 (at the moment, we're in bugfix mode for 0.1, due for release in three weeks at LugRadio Live 2006)

…and my immediate reaction was “why 0.1? why not 1.0?”. I know the Open Source way is to release early and release often – which is A Good Thing™ by the way – but I do object to the way projects pick < 1 version numbers to indicate their maturity (or lack thereof), because they’re underselling themselves. One of the common complaints levelled at Linux and Open Source Software is that nothing is ever finished, and this is because a vast number of projects never reach that golden 1.0 milestone. It hasn’t stoppped them being in widespread use, but they still give the impression they’re not ready yet. Why didn’t they hit 1.0? Because they reached the point where they were ‘good enough’ and didn’t need to go any further.

If it’s good enough to be used by the others, then give it a 1.0 version number to show that. It doesn’t matter if it’s not complete – as 37 signals would say:

Build half a product, not a half-ass product

It obviously does something otherwise you wouldn’t be releasing it yet, so say that. If it’s not then you shouldn’t be – you won’t stop yourself or the early adopters from using it by doing this and in the long run you’ll end up with a much better first release.

Just in case this post does get misinterpreted in someway, I’m using Jokosher purely as an example here. I’ve no idea how ‘mature’ it is, nor do I have an opinion on whether they should or shouldn’t release it at LugRadio Live. I just don’t want the team behind it – or any other project – to undersell themselves.

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