How did Oracle got to own this project? I imagine that thru the Sun acquisition. But, was this a project started/sponsored by Sun. I couldn't find any information in the hudson site or in the wikipedia page.
Kohsuke Kawaguchi (the founder/lead dev) used to work for Sun, and developed Hudson for them. Oracle got Hudson via the acquisition. Kohsuke stayed at Oracle for a while (longer than some other Sun devs, certainly), then left to form Infradna instead, providing Hudson consulting.
[1] http://infradna.com/