Yes you read it absolutely correctly; this is what Simon Phipps, Sun's Chief Open Source Officer said recently in an interview. Check out what he had to say:

Open source developers have been much more skeptical of Sun; a lot of open source developers don't remember the fact that Sun was pretty much the first open source start-up in 1982. All they can remember is what happened in 2001/2002 when, to be quite frank with you, we screwed up. We alienated a large group of open source developers by the attitudes we had of the community back then.

He is absolutely right since that era really left a bad taste in the mouth of developer community and in order to get over it Sun started all over again with its brand building exercise of open sourcing and as a result developers have again started to give a second thought to Java which was had started to lose its sheen and respect among the developer community. Take a look at the interview video.