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yeah, node doesn't do this. node 0.12.0 should actually be (at least) node 5.0, if they followed semver.

I think religious following of semver doesn't matter, but semver says that pre 1.0 numbers are essentially meaningless so nodejs might be actually following it correctly.

> Major version zero (0.y.z) is for initial development. Anything may change at any time. The public API should not be considered stable.

I think not:

> if your software is being used in production, it should probably already be 1.0.0. If you have a stable API on which users have come to depend, you should be 1.0.0. If you're worrying a lot about backwards compatibility, you should probably already be 1.0.0.

So, either they are using 0.y.z to allow themselves breaking changes whenever, or they are using it as a signal that it's not production-ready, or they are not following semantic versioning.

Is there another alternative?

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