Slashdot totally misinterpreted Jeremy's post about MySQL starting to build features first for their customers. As a business model , this sounds like a good way to get revenue , customers want certain features that are valuable to them , so why not let them pay for it .

The question however is how your development cycle works. Often this method of keeping code first for your paying customers , and when "the feature has been paid for" give it to the opensource community , is the wrong one.

What it comes down to is that you neglect the release early , release often and the peer review , many eyeballs see more bugs, fundamentals that made opensource projects big and stable. You are in effect stepping back to a proprietary model where you have to rush your deadlines because you have promised …

We are working hard on the next release of MySQL Workbench and are trying to follow our plan of getting a release out every second week. A lot of things have already been addressed, some new things came up. But we are clearly moving into the right direction and our investments in unit tests and UI tests seems to pay off as expected. More details in a post later this week.