Open source is better than not, but there's some great insights in Eric Raymon's paper The Cathedral and the Bazaar[0] with regards to how release early, releas

Open source is better than not, but there's some great insights in Eric Raymon's paper The Cathedral and the Bazaar[0] with regards to how release early, release often is better for the author, community, and (open source) project both in the near and long term. Releasing it, bugs and all, early on can build a real community in ways that dumping a finished project can never do. For example, look at projects like the original Netscape/Mozilla or Libreoffice open source projects and how long they took to build communities (with the former, they really didn't exist with non-AOL communities until AFTER a complete rewrite - Firefox - was launched; same was true with StarOffice/OpenOffice/Libreoffice). Then look at the similarly sized projects of Linux distributions, KDE, GNOME, and many others. Being able to get involved with a project early on, before it's too big to really jump into quickly and make a meaningful contribution, really helps build that initial core of developers who believe in and want/need the project. 1. http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/