Angie Byron, co-maintainer for Drupal 7 just published the target date for the first alpha release of Drupal 7. While the UI / string freeze for Drupal 7 was scheduled for 2008 November and then 2008 December previously, work is still ongoing to complete the overhaul of help text and menu items in some places. The new target date for text / UI changes is January 15, 2010. The first Drupal 7 alpha release is planned for that day, from when it should be available on localize.drupal.org for translation. Small text changes will still be allowed if related to critical bugfixes, but the plan as communicated by Angie is that otherwise we can consider the text in Drupal 7 frozen on that date.
[...] the plan is to treat Drupal 7 as a stable release from the first alpha, so that means no string fixes that don't fix bugs, same as Drupal 5 & 6.
Read more in her post titled Drupal 7.0 Alpha 1: Coming soon to a downloads page near you!
