“Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.” This is lesson 7 in Eric S. Raymond’s essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” Raymond first presented it in May 1997. O’Reilly published it in a book of the same title in 1999.
Raymond wrote that he had once believed the opposite. Early versions are “almost by definition buggy versions,” and developers did not want to “wear out the patience” of their users. Linux changed his mind. In its early days, Linus Torvalds sometimes released a new version of the kernel more than once a day.