How is decided, if a software version is called 1.1 / 1.0.1 / 1.0.0.1 / 1.0.0.0.1 etc.?
In: 1
It is usually up the people who write or market the software.
There are some general assumptions that most people have but the developers and their marketing team are free to ignore the if they think it is cool or would make them more money or avoid confusion.
Usually 1.0 is the first finished complete version. Everything less than 1.0 is not yet complete and considered to be in “beta” or similar.
Smaller changes mean smaller change in numbers.
A small fix might mean it goes from 1.1 to 1.1.1 a bigger change would mean going from 1.1 to 1.2 a complete new version of the product would mean going from 1.something to 2.
Often the version number has implications for licensing. So if you pay for version 1 you have access to anything that starts with a 1.something but not perhaps for anything that starts with 2.
There may be reason to avoid things like having a version that is 2.1.1 and later on that is 2.11, especially if you have non technical audience.
At other point when you have multiple competing product with similar versioning schemes you might want to ensure that your version is the biggest one so it doesn’t seem older than the competition even if that is not reflected in the actual changes to the product itself.
You may even jump some version numbers for good or bad reasons.
In some products there might be internal version numbers hidden deep in the code that reflect what is actually happening to the code under the hood and marketing version numbers that the consumer sees and are based on what sells best.
Microsoft went Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 to 10 in part to avoid having a version 9 of windows and supposedly to avoid confusion with their Windows 95, 98 and 98 SE products from the 90s. (The official version for Windows Vista, 7, 8 and 8.1 were NT 6.0, 6.1, 6.2 and 6.3 and internally they had version numbers that were for digits long and unrelated.)
Some open source developers refuse to reach 1.0 and approach almost asymptotically without ever quite reaching it until it is perfect.
Some projects have different strands in their release cycle where even and odd numbers may carry specific meaning. Some projects keep developing different version at the same time and have a scheme that they use to make clear which releases of which versions go together.
It would be nice if there were some hard rules, but there aren’t really. The best we have is:
Bigger number means newer.
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