Beta?
Is it about time we lose the Beta? I would make this release version 1.3.
I’m not sure, but I think it’s unusual to jump from version 0.3 to 1.3. ^^ Maybe 1.0? But on the other hand: who cares?
My vote is for 1.0. It’ll probably help us get slashdotted.
But 1.0 sounds like the first release. For some things newness is a virtue but for this type of software, maturity and stability are important. I don’t want to put my money in something that’s 1.0. 1.0 might be more interesting for a moment, but after that we’re still 1.0 and everyone who comes along thinks we just started. This is the third major release and 1.3 reflects that development history. (0.1, 0.2, 1.3)
Proprietary software developers often start at version 1 for the first release of a program and increment the major version number with each rewrite. This can mean that a program can reach version 3 within a few months of development, before it is considered stable or reliable.
In contrast to this, the free-software community tends to use version 1.0 as a major milestone, indicating that the software is “complete”, that it has all major features, and is considered reliable enough for general release.
— Wikipedia (source)
The above description is how I and most geeks view version 1.0 software. Slashdot readers and editors will understand that 1.0 means that we’re ready for business. Getting on Slashdot is the best advertising opportunity we’ll probably get for a very long time, so to willfully pass it up seems unwise to me.
I agree with lachesis and NLS. Version 1.0 is better for publicity, and is commonly taken to mean “we’re out of beta now, but don’t expect everything to be perfect.”
I vote for “1.0” and not “1.3” or something, bleh! (I also advice we use a major, minor and patch level version number, “0.0.00”.) I’ve used bitcoin-1.3.0.rc3-linux[1] and found it to be mature enough to be called “1.0” in my opinion. (It was already called 1.3 there, but I guess we cal all agree it’s the next release, thus right now can be called both 1.3 and 0.3.)
[1] http://www.bitcoin.org/download/bitcoin-1.3.0.rc3-linux.tar.gz
I think version 0.3 would be a better choice if Bitcoin wasn’t making financial transactions on Windows. A significant number of people, particularly Windows users, don’t trust software below version 1.1 or 1.2, but going from version 0.2 to 1.3 will backfire when those users find out we skipped the first three 1.x versions.
I’m not much of a marketing guy or anything but it makes sense to me to refer to software like this by the version in source control, like Bitcoin r82 or whatever.. maybe that’s too geeky for some people.
OK, back to 0.3 then.
Please download RC4 and check it over as soon as possible. I’d like to release it soon.
Other than the version number change, which included changes in readme.txt and setup.nsi, I reduced the maximum number of outbound connections from 15 to 8 so nodes that accept inbound don’t get too many connections. 15 was a lot more than needed. 8 is still plenty for redundancy.