Milestone Question

I am trying to find some information about Milestone releases. Am I allowed to simply take the Milestone jars and deploy them in a production application at my company? I am trying to work with Riak NoSQL database and I can't get Maven to bring in the dependencies, so I would like to simply put them in our repository here at work. I tried to find some info on Milestone releases and how they can be used, but I can't find anything. Can someone point me to some documentation or explain the purpose of the Milestone releases?

A milestone release indicates that the Spring library in question is still undergoing active development and features, methods, method signatures and other parts of the library may change as development continues. Usually each project issues a small number of incremental milestone releases (M1, M2, etc) while working toward a stable release candidate (RC1, RC2, etc). Release candidates are supposed to be feature frozen and subsequent releases just contain bug fixes until the final version is tagged as GA and made the official release. So a typical project maturation would be 1.0.0.M1, 1.0.0.M2, 1.0.0.RC1, 1.0.0,RELEASE with the final version considered stable and complete.

All versions of the Spring projects are released as open source regardless of whether they are milestones, release candidates, or GA releases. If the milestone version satisfies your application needs, passes your unit and integration tests, and you can tolerate potential API changes in future versions, then you can certainly use it in a production application - lots of cutting edge developers do this. However, it is also common for developers to wait for a stable release version so that they can be certain the library has been tried and tested by a lot of developers.

Adam FitzGerald
SpringSource

Thank you.