posted 12 years ago
They are completely open to interpretation. Every software producer has their own idea of what is considered a major release, or a revision, or whatever. As a matter of fact, lately there's been a bit of a shift towards major releases, i.e., new versions formerly considered minor releases are now released as a major one. Think of how fast Mozilla went from Firefox 3 to Firefox 9.
Personally I would use a major release when the program has almost completely changed, either in user experience or underlying architecture. Minor releases are for when you add new big features to an application, and revisions/builds/updates are for changes or fixes to existing features. I would also use the suffix -b to indicate a beta version.
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