I would say its sorta like what Apple did, except Perl5 is still production ready and in active development.   Although Perl6 has the Perl label for historical reasons and out of respect to Larry Wall, Perl5 and Perl6 are considered distinct languages by their respective communities and each has an independent development track.  Even after Perl6 considers itself version 1 complete, Perl5 will continue to be worked on, and in fact it will continue to be the only version of Perl with a full library of tools and jobs available.