I love Charles Miller’s suggestion for a standard way of versioning open source projects.
It does seem like every damn project has their own numbering system,
so it’s hard to separate the betas from something you can actually use in a
production environment.

Anyways, I cannot find the link on his website anymore, so I’m pasting
a fragment of his post from my RSS aggregator.

[…]
Too many Open Source projects treat Version 1.0 as some kind of Holy
Grail that can only be reached when the project is perfect. I find that
highly annoying, because it makes it really, really difficult to tell a
sketchy alpha from production code that is just still in pre-1.0 because
the author wants it to do everything.

My best advice to anyone thinking of starting such a project: put
together a road-map now. List the features you want to see in your
program, and then cull it down to three milestones:

The bare minimum you would need to implement before you let
anyone see your code.
The bare minimum functionality you would need to implement before
people could legitimately make use of your code
As above, but stable and well-documented enough to be used in a
production system (for libraries), or by non-programmer end-users
(for applications)
Milestone 1 is your v0.5. Milestone 2 is v0.9. Milestone 3 is v1.0.
[…]

UPDATE (7/29 10:29PM): Found the Permalink off of Javablogs. Click Here.