Oh interesting, thanks for this!

It is no wonder that they couldn't come up with a better name [0]. For anyone else wondering, we came up with that name because it was the name of the conference room that we met in at the Sun campus to discuss creating Apache Jakarta, because Sun was upset we were originally using Apache Java. As a 'gift' of appreciation for making a halfway decent servlet engine at the time (Apache JServ), they also gave us Apache Ant and... Tomcat. The rest is history...

I've also been long out of the Java ecosystem, so that xkcd is especially relevant. Let's go shopping!

[0] https://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/506010907021828096 (this keeps coming up for me recently for some reason)

Well, let’s add that the project didn’t want to continue with the “standard committee”-like model, so they quit on their own accord, not due to some malicious intent on Oracle’s part. But as a now outside entity it would indeed wouldn’t make sense to use the standard lib’s packages, so a change was necessary.

No. Tomcat was created by James Davidson, who worked for Sun, and then heavily modified once it was over in Apache Jakarta.

I did a few contributions to the codebase (I wrote the first class reloader implementation), but was super busy with many other codebases at that point that I had started/created... Turbine, Velocity, Multiple Commons projects, etc.