From the ‘I asked, Linus answered’ files:
SAN DIEGO. Linus Torvalds took stage tonight at the LinuxCon conference in a panel discussion about the state of Linux. Lucky for me they took questions from the audience via Twitter – though apparently i was the only one that asked questions over Twitter…
I asked about the naming issue – many of us were almost caught of guard by how the whole Linux 3.0 name came about, with Linus pretty much saying at the time that the numbers in the 2.6.x series had simply just gotten too large. The last 2.6 kernel was the 2.6.39 kernel.
So I wondered – when will he make the call to move to Linux 4.0?
“When we hit the 30’s,” Torvalds said. (ie. when the 3.30 kernel debuts.)
Greg Kroah-Hartman who joined Torvalds onstage said that it doesn’t matter, and that it’s just a number.
“We are not going to go to the mid-30’s,” Torvalds said. “It’s just mentally much easier for people to remember the small number. We’ll do 4.0 in three years maybe when the sub numbers have grown in the 20’s and our feeble brains can’t handle it.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.