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Comment by azhenley | Hacker News Reader

I went to see what the big changes were to justify a new major version number and saw:

“The numbering change is not indicative of anything special. If you want to have an official reason, it's that I ran out of fingers and toes to count on, so 4.21 became 5.0”

I laughed out loud.

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I can't help myself. I need to know why 5.0. Is there a reason, even a pointless one? Or is it truly a "just because" moment?

Any reason you choose :)

From the OP email:

| So go wild. Make up your own reason for why it's 5.0.

Because 4.22 would unfairly wear down the 2 key.

> even a pointless one

> I ran out of fingers and toes to count on

Because 4.20 was a very special release.

It probably is simply “just because”. Not the first time Linus feels it, IIRC 3.0 was basically bumped for the same non-reason.

I think there was at least a Google+ poll.

Its seriously just Linus doesn't like counting past 20. We only got 4.20 for the weed meme.

3.19 -> 4.0 and 4.20 -> 5.0 just because.

I mean, that's the way it's been forever. IIRC, the release for 3.0 had the same type of message with it. There was no big breaking change, it just felt like it was time to bump the big number.

The kernel versioning (as of 3.0) has always been arbitrary. Go wild.

OK so Linus, like most, has 10 fingers and 10 toes: totaling 20.. Yet 4.21 was already assigned. What was the last thing he counted on? Guesses below.

whatever it was, he was using a lot of it back for the 1.3 series, which made it up to 1.3.100 at least.

Actually it’s enough to know that you’re beyond all appendages. Ie one plus all fingers+toes.

I believe most people, Linus included, have 8 fingers and 2 thumbs, making it 10 digits in total.

...but you can count to 256 on 8 fingers...

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