That’s a version number. Semver is a way of versioning. Now, saying "it bothers me that they don’t use semver" (which has them in the company of other small projects like typescript or the linux kernel) is a statement you can make, but "why use semver" when they don’t makes little sense.

Semver is a set of conventions on an older versioning scheme. The semver 1.0.0 spec (I think from 2010?) even points out:

> This is not a new or revolutionary idea. In fact, you probably do something close to this already. The problem is that “close” isn’t good enough. Without compliance to some sort of formal specification, version numbers are essentially useless for dependency management.

Thus, X.Y.Z does not automatically mean "semver". Nor does even X.0.0 mean semver.

To give some 20th century counter-examples found through Google Scholar:

"System Description: Spass Version 1.0.0" (1999) https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-48660-7_34

"This is version 2.0.0 of the software." (1999) https://econpapers.repec.org/software/bocbocode/s365703.htm

"This report provides the NIKE3D user's manual update summary for changes made from version 3.0.0 April 24, 1995 to version 3.3.6 March 24, 2000" - https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/15004757

It's rather than semver looks like it. Curl predates semver by 15 years. People have been numbering their software release as $major.$minor.$patch forever.

Oh yeah. The `x.y.z` notation that already existed and that SemVer just adopted is totally a surefire signal that “SemVer Here”.

You’ve got the order of events all mixed up.