Yeah, I know. At one time though, version numbering was used as a signal to other developers that relied on your software. Changing the major version number indicated a large change -- either API, or architectural, or both -- that was expected to break software that relied on it. So then, as an end-user, it was easy to keep track of which pieces were likely to be compatible with which other pieces; if your add-on or what-have-you worked with version 2.1, then it would work with 2.1.1, and probably work with 2.2, but probably not work with 3.0.
I guess people got bored with the sensibility of that, or something.
Linux has kept its main public interfaces stable for all of its several hundred post-1.0 releases, so using that scheme would mean Linux would have to use rather odd-looking version numbers like 1.632.5
Isn't the point of this to start correctly using the minor version numbers again, to get back to a good versioning system? And since it's a different scheme it makes a lot of sense to increment the major version to separate it.
Why not just go to a basic increment (Linux 3, 4, 5, 6, ...), or a date-based (Linux 2011! Now with new ribbon interface!) numbering instead?
...eh. I dunno why this bothers me so much.