As an early adopter I am using Thunderbird 3 for quite a while now. The Betas have been really stable and other than a few minor glitches I had no problems.
I just saw that RC 2 is out there after RC 1 was released in the last week. Be careful with the release. My copy was crashing every time I tried to send an email. I couldn’t figure out the exact problem yet but not being able to send messages is quite inconvenient in my opinion.
Today I needed a fuse for my car, so I looked up a car service near work. A colleague told me that A.T.U. is near by so I checked Google Maps. Google maps wanted me to have a 20 minutes drive to a place with a completely different postal code but the same street name. What tells us this? It tells us that Google might be good but they certainly don’t know everything…
Last week MySQL 5.1 was finally anounced. Now the MySQL founder Michael “Monty” Widenius commented on the release. He said that this version is crap. It contains a lot of bugs which can trigger data inconsistencies, system crashes or might be used as an attack vector on the MySQL infrastructure. In MySQL 5.1 a five year old bug is included which made it even to the Wikipedia site for MySQL. His explanation for this disastrous situation was too early change to release candidate status instead of pushing short releases as alpha or beta.
His solution for these problems: Change the development and release model. Let the community drive the development so that quality software is created. He mentioned the models used by PostgreSQL and Drizzle.
Drizzle is a code fork of MySQL and not owned by any company. Knowing the open source world a bit, this could be the answer to a lot of uncertainties which came up when Sun bought MySQL. But this depends on how the Drizzle developers doing their work.