You seem to be very concerned about alphas hurting the net. But I think the guys in BearShare labs know about the risk. That is why the alpha has the expiration date, and the alpha is announced only in BearShare labs forum. That is the only place where can be found the link to the alphas (only one that I know). So, there is not that big userbase with the alphas.

And I'm also pretty sure that they have tested the alpha in pirvately very long before releasing it public. The first public alpha version number was 35, so there was least that many private releases before the public version. That means months of testing and developing.

There are also numerious of different "Final release" clients which are much more harmful to the network, mostly because the higher number of users. That would be eliminated if the users upgrade their client to the recent version, or move to other client which is under active development.


That is they have chosen. The way BearShare staff have chosen is different, and they have done a lot to minize the risks that they may cause.