They are not planning to go Gnome 4, hence Gnome 3.40 became 40. Just like Emacs went from 1.12 to 13.

> I was mostly surprised by the "Gnome 50" part. Last I remembered Gnome was still version 3. Turns out they jumped from 3.38 to version 40

I think GTK is version 5, so they have to converge somewhere.

This is an old trick from SW developers to show a suppose maturity: bump the version number.

Then there’s the Linux approach: bump the major version when Linus feels the minor number is too large.

To me a larger version number doesn't signify a more mature codebase, it signifies less mature developer and developer culture, that doesn't care about backward compatibility and semantic versions.