[evdawg]

I believe they do owe the community a few things.

They owe the community a transparent and open development process. They are doing this with Lighthouse and GitHub. Anybody can submit a bug, patch, watch other tickets, see commits being made every single day.

They also owe the community responsible release management by releasing stable code. They are doing this by delaying the RC.

So in my books, the complainers really have NO angle here.

[tghw]

You missed one thing: They owe the community reasonable expectations of when new releases will drop. That doesn't mean they say a date and always hit it, it just means that they communicate that they are behind their original schedule, a new estimate, and a list of blockers. That way, the community knows what they can do to help.

[powellc]

Exactly, and while they certainly don't have to do any of that, when you have commercial developers counting on you, you will lose your community over time with a mantra of "Fuck you."

Also, while you could go digging through tickets to figure out what's holding it up, why have a release manager?

It seems as though the honeymoon has been over for some time with rails anyway. Between arrogent devs and the Rails 3 delay, I've moved on.