In this much anticipated sequel to the 2012 hit talk, "Being a Good OSS Contributor", "Five Years of Beta" explores the tumultuous history of Doctrine MongoDB ODM (without the apologetics). Although it began as a weekend hack to port Doctrine 2's data mapper pattern to NoSQL, the project's master branch was cutting its teeth on production servers early on as a core dependency of the very first startups built with Symfony 2.0. After five years of adoption, improvements, refactoring, and tracking the development of its ORM sister project, the only thing that hadn't changed was its stability: BETA. The ODM's story is replete with valuable lessons for anyone involved with an open-source project, contributors and maintainers alike. This session will discuss what we could have done better, note ways that the greater community helped the project survive, and examine how we ultimately buckled down and shipped 1.0.0.