“It should come as no surprise that the mainstream press and the
non-Linux specific IT media treated the recent arrival of the 2.4
kernel as a big news event. After all, they’ve been trained since
birth in Pavlovian fashion to jump up and down in excitement
whenever a
really-big-software-company-that-we-aren’t-going-to-mention-this-week
ratchets up a version number by one tenth of a unit.”
“It’s not too much of an oversimplification to say that 2.4 is
pretty much the same as 2.4beta, only with fewer bugs. Likewise
2.4.1 will have even fewer bugs and maybe an extra feature or two.
Yes, there is the fact that Linus has given the nod to the current
code – which is not something that should be ignored. But take it
from me; most of the betas that were floating around were
considerably more stable than certain OS products you can buy.”
“The big difference between closed source versioning and
open source versioning is philosophical. In reality most software
is a work in progress. Open source developers admit this up front.
Close source developers, while not actually hiding the information,
prefer not to draw anyone’s attention to it.”