Several comments -- Managing bug reports/release management is a really big timesink... I can say this both from my professional work as well as my jEmplode work, which is far less complex than the entire Empeg project. The Alpha team is setup to catch the obvious things quickly and it saves everyone a lot of time. Imagine if everyone was reporting the same bug (which happens ... a lot)? What a pain -- especially when they're doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. Optimizing that process is essential to all of us continuing to get releases.

Also, like Rob said, the Alpha team is under NDA, so we can see stuff you can't So in some cases it's not feasible from a marketing standpoint to deploy to a wide beta without revealing competitive info.

Also, there was something at the bottom of the NDA about souls and first borns. I didn't really understand it -- I think it was written in "proper" English, or something. But apparently the Empeg team feeds off of the lifeblood of the Alpha team and would actually wither and die without us. Anyway, I just signed it (in blood).

ms