In fairness, Oracle keeps developing JVM and Java rather nicely, and keeps it open enough. I had expected worse.

Java has a much stronger open source community with lots of corporate players. If Oracle tried to close the doors on it, everybody can pivot away in much shorter time than Vmware.

Where were all those players when Google torpedoed Sun?

The large majority of work done in OpenJDK is by Oracle employees.

Had it been for most of those players, Java 6 would have been the last version.

I don't exactly get what you mean by "Google torpedoed Sun".

Corporate players came into play after Oracle acquired Sun. The fear that Oracle would do the same as LibreOffice pushed players like IBM to have their own Java distributions.

Of course Oracle having more support for OpenJDK is not surprising. However, the open nature and existing players already make it easier to fork / replace Java compared to Vmware.

Sun did not sue Google because they already lacked the money to do so.

What Google did with Android, it is hardly any different from Microsoft with J++, only that there the courts had another outcome.

Android with a Java subset and Kotlin, is hardly any different outcome than .NET with C#.

Corporate players came in, after money was available again, after the acquisition.

"James Gosling Triangulation's Interview on Google vs. Sun"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYw3X4RZv6Y&t=3462s

"James Gosling on Android and Java"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT__Nrr3PNI&t=6245s

If Google actually cared about Java, they missed their opportunity to acquire Sun, own Java, do whatever they felt like doing with it for Android, and the rest of the industry, and best of all, they would never had to bother with any lawsuit.

Given how much the so called existing players contributed to save Java while Sun was going under, that is whishful thinking.