For the ranges to work at all, you need to use the 2.0.0-beta-7
version of the maven release plugin.
Many of our poms currently reference 2.0.0-beta-6 so the release process
doesn't understand version ranges.
But even with the latest version there are bugs related to snapshots
http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MRELEASE-318
http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNG-3092
This shouldn't be issue if you have your ~/.m2/settings.xml exclude snapshots
when doing releases????