About

ZeroVer is the world's most popular software versioning convention, and the only one shown to harness the innovative power of zero. The benefits are innumerable and the effects on the software world are profound.

ZeroVer is satire. Seriously, don't actually use it.

On April Fools' Day 2018, Mahmoud Hashemi roped in Mark, Moshe, Kurt, and a few other long-suffering collaborators to unleash version 0.0.1. He's mostly busy with FinFam these days.

If this humble attempt at programmer humor wrecked your release schedule, well, someone didn't scroll all the way to the bottom of the page (or click on "About").

Real talk

Software is hard. Versioning is nuanced. Creative projects rarely obey strict schedules. There are many reasons why software gets left in prerelease mode. But there's no shortage of yak to shave.

If your project has made the ZeroVer list, it definitely meets consensus criteria for having a public release. You've built something useful and great, and continuing to advertise prerelease status hurts adoption, especially for adopters trying to convince others that your software is as dependable as practice shows.

Here are recommended guidelines from two of the most popular versioning schemes:

  • CalVer: "If both you and someone you don't know use your project seriously, then use a serious version."
  • SemVer: "If your software is being used in production, it should probably already be 1.0.0."

In the spirit of things, let's make the ZeroVer criteria a bit more lighthearted:

  • ZeroVer: If a project has a logo or Wikipedia article, but not a major version, it's officially 0ver.

For additional ZeroVer criteria, check out the submissions page.

Here's a Wikidata Query that helped find some notable 0ver users.

What to do

0ver.org may list some auspicious names, but it's not a very good look. If you're having trouble picking a version, or are stuck asymptotically approaching an "actual" release, do yourself a favor and slap a CalVer on it. You'll be in much better company.

© 2021