Richard Gabriel has an interesting post about the inner motivations of the Java group inside Sun. Gabriel is a practitioner of Languages for Smart People (LFSP) as evidenced by the content on his own website: Dream Songs.  Yes, I've linked to his site before in the piece "Have Object's Failed?".  However, I did tell you his side of the argument, something I'll do a bit later.

Well, he talks about the separation of "Church and State" :

Many of Sun's Java activities have never made a profit and never were intended to. This had always been justified by the phrase, ?Church versus State.? ?State? was the part of Sun trying to make money with Java, and ?Church? was the part that pushes and maintains the values Java represents. And the latter was never intended to make money. Think of how many companies would ever embrace an idea like ?Church??

Quite assuring statements from somebody inside the "belly of the beast".  Incidentally, I've noted before that Gilad Bracha the person responsible for the evolution of the Java language describes himself as a Computational Theologist.