Linux 3.0 a steady step forward

IDG News Service - Bucking standard conventions in software versioning, Linus Torvalds has designated the new release of the Linux operating system kernel posted Friday as version 3.0, even while maintaining that the release is only a routine update. 

"Sure, we have the usual two thirds driver changes, and a lot of random fixes, but the point is that 3.0 is just about renumbering ... No breakage, no special scary new features, nothing at all like that," Torvalds wrote on the Linux Kernel mailing list.

The new kernel was almost released July 19, but the last-minute discovery of a subtle bug, and testing of a patch for it, delayed the release.

For the past eight years, the volunteer developers behind Linux have been laboring on version 2.6. This new release was bumped up to version 3.0 in honor of Linux's 20th anniversary, which takes place this year, as well as to streamline the increasingly cumbersome version numbering. The previous stable version of Linux kernel was 2.6.39.3.          More