An analyst came up with a $250 million annually for Java licenses. Andy Rubin said (exhibit 13) that "Sun is prepared to walk away from a $100M annual J2ME licensing business" into a deal with Google for some portion of Android income, which obviously is not an exact but indicates the scale.
Java wasn't going to power a Sun-sized company by itself, but having this income dry up while already trying to save the company from linux is a death blow.
Java wasn't going to power a Sun-sized company by itself, but having this income dry up while already trying to save the company from linux is a death blow.