I have seen this work and work well on a large website that was simultaneously releasing in something like 20 different languages.<p>However that company was not in the USA.  And I see no way to square that development philosophy with Sarbanes-Oxley, so publicly traded companies in the USA cannot do it.<p>But for an interesting example of a large well-known open source project with something like that development philosophy, check out <a href="http://clang.llvm.org/" rel="nofollow">http://clang.llvm.org/</a>.  The strategy scales better than you'd expect!