It seems to me like they realize that Hudson would be a good asset for them in some way and since the code was so long ago open-sourced, they feel like their on

It seems to me like they realize that Hudson would be a good asset for them in some way and since the code was so long ago open-sourced, they feel like their only move left to play is this (dubious) trademark of the name. The other half is this is that it seems like they want to avoid any sort of bad PR over a pretty visible OSS project which was under their (inherited) hosting umbrella (java.net) moving to other hosting platforms because Oracle's platform is so unreliable or just flat-out not popular.