It's an interesting question. Because rubygems only knows about pre-release status via "rc" in the version, if we push a gem < 1.0.0 it will be considered '"final." With the projects we're considering shipping via this versioning, I believe we don't consider them "final" and thus they probably shouldn't got to rubygems. I guess for gems only we could switch the versioning strategy back to "rc" instead of zero-based, but I think this would cause more confusion than help.