I can't disagree with this more. 1) Most bigger open source projects have a core team. Think about the jQuery team for example. Often, the release candidates a

I can't disagree with this more. 1) Most bigger open source projects have a core team. Think about the jQuery team for example. Often, the release candidates are intended for the core team, not the general user. 2) General users of a particular project generally know better than to use RC's in production. They might not be part of the core team, and unless they are going after a specific feature or bug, will ignore RC's and go with latest stable releases. 3) Release Candidates are supposed to be feature complete. If a user needs to start testing their applications against new features being introduced can usually do so early against Release Candidates. So contrary to the author's statement, indeed you can expect 3rd party engineers doing those kinds of integration tests to file bugs when things aren't working right. I've certainly done it, and I imagine many devs on HN have too. 4) If you want to look at a situation where you don't get Release Candidates, remember how often Facebook changed and broke Facebook Connect over the last couple years. It is not fun having to re-architect your FB integration 3x within a matter of a few months because they just pushed code live with little or no warning.