There’s a reason that the tagline for this blog is, “When being stupid is smart.”
Consider the ill received KDE 4.0 destkop.
Arguably the devs did the right thing. They’ve been working hard on the Linux desktop for years and deserve a lot of praise for their labour. This release they decided to ship an early version of their software so that developers of other applications could get a head start on interfacing with it. They changed some core architecture to benefit the long term develoment of the software.
Good things, yes. But then they made a mistake, a tragic mistake. They named the software “4.0″. Oops.
In the commercial software world, a release of the form X.0 means don’t touch this software with a ten foot pole. At least wait until the first really critical bug-fix release of X.0.1, but it’s recommended that you wait until X.1 or X.2 and the major stuff that was wrong with it has been satisfactorially ironed out.
In the Open Source Software (OSS) world, X.0 means something different. It means that you’ve laboured long and hard over your software, polishing and tweaking. It means that you’ve finally reached the point where your ego will let you ship with pride. It means you’ve gone through an alpha release and a beta release and 7 release candidates to get to the sparkling X.0 release.
Stupid stuff is important; generally this causes geeks no end of frustration. A good codebase should be a good codebase regardless of your naming convention. But not even geeks are exempt from the madness, and a good development ready codebase with a X.0 moniker is a disappointment.