It was worse than that. They took whatever unreleased code was in the gnu repository on a random day, and started patching that. gcc 2.96 was known for miscompiling all sorts of stuff. GNU caught a lot of flack for a compiler they didn't even release.

AFAK Red Hat did this as they wanted to support ia64, but no (released) gcc version had a backend for it.

2 sides of this story:

http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-2.96.html

https://linux.web.cern.ch/docs/other/gcc296/