The following is a humorous comparison of the release numbering of the LONI Pipeline v3 against various organizations

LONI Pipeline Open source Microsoft Google Apple
internal testing alpha 1.0 shh... top secret unsubstantiated rumors
alpha beta 2.0 beta rumors with possibly some substance to them
beta release candidate 3.0 beta developer seeds
beta 1.0 various: 3.1, 95, 98, 2000, XP beta release
release 2.0 SP1,2,3,... beta recall

Starting with version 3, the Pipeline release numbers will be assigned by the following conventions: v${version.major}.${version.minor}${release.branch}${branch.major}${branch.minor}

For example, v3.0beta2.1 specifies that this is major version 3, minor version 0, beta release, branch major 2, branch minor 1