In Italian there is an expression “putting a good face over a bad game”. Sun was in shambles and had no muscle to force Google to do the right thing. The CEO was already so embattled that he couldn’t admit he had mismanaged the relationship. So they just smiled and tried to spin it as a great thing for the Java ecosystem at large; which, at the time, it kinda was. After all, it basically gave Java programmers a mobile story that wasn’t the dying J2ME, and even a new client-side story that could replace the quickly-disappearing desktop toolkits.

Sun went along with it because they were out of money to sue and Google knew it.

If it were that cut and dry they'd be able to find the money. At a bare minimum a law firm would pick them up on a contingency.

If Google actually cared about not being sued by Oracle or eventually IBM, they should have bought Sun and do whatever they wanted with Java.

Now they deserve everything they will get out of this.

Or.. you know... there was 40 years of case law that APIs were fair game, and you shouldn't need to buy out a competitor to leverage that.

Yeah, but the issue there was more moral than legal: fragmentation undermined the java story of write once, run everywhere. Key to java's success.