Sam Ruby wrote:

Of course, it could had been a funny thing :)

You should also remember that our friend Pier make many remarks about stability on tomcat 4.x and proposed sometimes ago on tomcat-dev to start a fork to make a minimal but more stable TC 4.X

I agree, if at anytime, TC 3.3.x was said as obsolete or to be discontinued, I'll had to choose an alternate servlet engine since TC 3.2 was too slow and memory consuming and TC 4.x still not production ready.

But the good thing in making TC 3.3 and 4.x teams continuing their own works was that Tomcat 5 get the best of both part, and was really quickly launched using jakarta-tomcat-connectors as a common sandbox.

Sometimes, when you let 2 teams works in parallel on similar project but different implementation, you avoid that one team fly to another umbrella (ie sf.net) and sus save the community and also you could help making the next revolution by merging good ideas from both projects.