I think you misunderstood what I was saying. No one wants Nokia to push unstable software to the devices of unexperienced users. When I talk about creating an unstable branch it has to be a seperate repository that one has to explicitly enable through an entry in your APT sources.list. Again Fedora as an Example. While the majority of the userbase is using the stable Fedora 12, willing testers could install pre-release version of Fedora 13 as soon as 12 became finished although it won't get officially released before the end of May. You can even switch to "rawhide" and run what will become Fedora 14 eventually. It doesn't harm normal users as those don't run it and probably don't even know they can. When you visit the Fedora download page the stable version is offered to you. Pre-release versions are for those who want to experience the latest development progress and who want to help to make the actual product better. It's a well-proven concept in the software industry, not only in the open source sector. Microsoft does it too, as do most developers of nearly any big software project.

Yeah, for phones it is quite uncommon. But in the past, the software running on those couldn't do crap. Now Maemo is a full-blown Linux operating system stack no less complex as any other Linux distribution. If I want to have a phone, I'd get one for ten bucks. Paying 500+ is only justified by the fact that it isn't some phone but a powerful mobile computer. The software development model should take that into account.

I don't whine for not having PR 1.2. My N900 runs fine and I don't have any problem with it. For me it's about working towards a vivid software community around Maemo/MeeGo. I think Nokia realized these issues too and therefore announced that the development of MeeGo will happen in the open.