[fnordsensei]

Don't stare yourself blind at version numbers, they're just a way to distinguish one version from another.

Open source projects generally don't follow the same versioning conventions as closed source projects, as they don't require you to fork over money for each sharp version.

Also, software can rarely ever be said to be "complete", even theoretically. Only very small programs can be written once and be said to fulfil their purpose from then on. For larger programs and systems, the needs and requirements is usually something you try to approximate with ever increasing precision. But usually needs and requirements is a moving target as well, making this task perpetual.

This conspires to make 1.0 more of a marketing decision than to map to any real "completeness". I've seen whole program rewrites in a 0.01 change of an open source project. Similarly I've seen projects bumped to 1.0 with very little ceremony simply because it's been used in production for 8 years now, and why the hell not?

[fapjacks]

I actually looked but couldn't find it in my links, but out there on the internet somewhere is an interesting marketing study showing how profoundly more likely people are to pay for software that is versioned at least 1.0. All of my personal projects are 0.x.x, rarely making it to 1.0. Meanwhile, my business projects rarely start under 1.0.