Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, but Linux founder and “keeper of the flame”, Linus Torvalds, has put developers and the rest of the world on notice that a Linux 4.0 is coming sooner rather than later, “I don't want us to get to the kinds of crazy numbers we had in the 2.x series, so at some point we're going to cut over from 3.x to 4.x, just to keep the numbers small and easy to remember. We're not there yet, but I would actually prefer to not go into the twenties, so I can see it happening in a year or so, and we'll have 4.0 follow 3.19 or something like that,” said Linus Torvalds in the Linux kernel 3.12 announcement.

Torvalds goal, however is not to just change numbering willy-nilly, but rather to release something more momentous accompanying something as large as a full prefix change. To that end, his plan is to have developers focus strictly on bug fixes prior to the release of 4.0 in order to give it unparalleled stability…as long as developers can avoid succumbing to their inner squirrel!

“I may be pessimistic, but I'd expect many developers would go "Let's hunt bugs.. Wait. Oooh, shiny" and go off doing some new feature after all instead. Or just take that release off.

But I do wonder…Maybe it would be possible, and I'm just unfairly projecting my own inner squirrel onto other kernel developers. If we have enough heads-up that people ‘know’ that for one release (and companies/managers know that too) the only patches that get accepted are the kind that fix bugs, maybe people really would have sufficient attention span that it could work. And the reason I mention ‘4.0’ is that it would be a lovely time to do that. Roughly a year’s heads-up that ‘ok, after 3.19 (or whatever), we're doing a release with ‘just’ fixes, and then that becomes 4.0’,” said Torvalds.