I would disagree with that characterization. At the time it was released Sun was losing the battle for "Web" mindshare to SGI and was on the verge of becoming irrelevant as the 'wave' of the Web hit its crusty servers. There was certainly a lot of 'drag' as they say in terms of buying servers from the maker of Java. Especially as it became the defacto business logic implementation tool. So while I don't think licensing revenues paid the development bills (I may be wrong there) I know it kept Sun in the game during the dot.com explosion.