Given google's reputation for being open, they're not likely to pursue a law suit like oracle just because there's money in it. The media outrage will hurt their reputation more than the monetary gain.
It's silly to imply that Oracle brought this suit against Google just to score a few bucks, but easy to say when you dislike Oracle. The alternative, and very likely real reason for the suit, is that Oracle actually cares about its intellectual property and would prefer that Google not do what they will with it.
I think it's far more likely that Oracle has seen a way to get a slice of the Android pie, and the rapidly growing long-term revenue stream that it likely represents.
Again, they don't need a long-term revenue stream. I'd wager that their revenue stream from Oracle Database and other products, as well as the long-term support contracts for those products, shadows Android in comparison. Bold, I know, but Oracle is widely, widely used in the enterprise sector. The salary for an Oracle DBA alone speaks volumes regarding this.
In your world, Oracle executives sit around and think: boy, we could score a small percentage of that Android market. It pales in comparison to what we can make off of enterprise customers, but that cash flow is definitely worth the negative publicity and community recoil!
Completely ridiculous.
Your comment is merely another angle of repetitive arguments attempting to make Oracle out to be the bad party for suing Google. While I dislike Oracle just as much as the next geek for their treatment of open-source products, they might actually have a point with this lawsuit. That's all I'm saying, and watching my karma swing around wildly for taking the middle ground instead of jumping on the anti-Oracle bandwagon is amusing.
The people who buy their software understand things like duty to shareholders, and Oracle has historically determined that exercises like this are part of that duty.
About suing for money: The accumulation of patent in large companies is necessary because if they don't patent everything, someone else will and they'll be in trouble. But suing another big corporation "just to protect the patent" is mutually assured destruction because the company being sued has probably patented a lot of petty little things that the company suing is using and can counter sue. Unless there's a lot to gain, they don't because the only people that will get anything out of it is their patent lawyers.
Oracle does have a case against google, but saying that they're doing it just to protect their intellectual property is a bit naive.