I see many open source projects insist on staying in 0.xxx version for a very long time despite that the product has been proven useful and very stable. Trac is one example. They even risked switching from 0.9 to 0.10 which might confuse a lot of users about which is more recent.

I wonder if this is a cultural paradigm, an honor code in open source community or simply a strict interpretation of release cycle management? Would a person who releases first version as "1.0 beta" be banished from open source world, or more realistically appeal less number of contributors?

For some projects it even looks like they will never switch to 1.0 ever but only approximating only half way each time, like Zeno's paradox.