What’s with Sun and version numbers? I remember back in the day when we had Solaris 1 and Solaris 2 and SunOS 5 and SunOS 6 and then Solaris 7 and so on. If you were a Sun afficionado you know that some of those things were really the same thing, but it was a big freaking mess. Now we’re seeing even more bizarre version number antics from Sun when it comes to Java. Sun has decided that the next release of Java will be called J2SE 5.0. The version string that the JVM reports will still be 1.5. So that means all developers will still call it Java 1.5. What makes this weirder is that this harkens back to the days when Java 1.2 was released. Sun decided to call it Java 2, hence J2EE and J2SE and J2ME, because 1.2 had so many new features. So now we’re keeping the 2, which used to stand for 2.0, so when 1.5 is released, we’ll still have the old 2.0 around, and the new 5.0 number, and the original 1.x number. Does this make sense to anyone? What happens when we have the next really big Java upgrade? Will we keep the 5.0 number around for historical purposes as well? Does anyone else find it odd that Java has never managed to actually leave a major version number behind?