Oracle is dropping the ball here. They appear to only see value in the trademark, but not in the people. I predict the brand value to shift over to Jenkins fairly quickly.
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.
I think Jenkins is a much better name. Even after seeing a Hudson demo and seeing the butler character I quickly forgot what "Hudson" was supposed to evoke.
I was under the impression they were using the brand in an attempt to get the people to do what they wanted (use their crappy open source infrastructure).
Jenkins is a great name, by the way.