I'm glad this actually didn't happen, since it took a long time for the 4.0 branch to become stable and usable. If it weren't for the "legacy" codebase being continually developed, we would have been stuck with a slow 3.2 and a buggy 4.0. I've used Tomcat 3.3 for more than a year before switching to 4.1, and I liked 3.3 a lot for its speed and features.
What would have been more likely to happen is that Tomcat 3.3 would have continued on SourceForge, been known by a different name, had a fully supported servlet 2.3 facade, and would have been known as the production quality servlet engine.
In retrospect, I think the decision to continue the development on both Tomcat versions was a good one. It let the time solve the frictions. The result is that now we have a very mature Tomcat community, and little of the past problems are reflected today on the mailing list.
+1
- Sam Ruby
