I think an official project from Google would be hosted under https://github.com/google, a GitHub Org which contains 2,800 repositories and has more than 500 Google employees as member.
replygoogleworkspace/cli appears to be more of a hobby project developed by a single Google employee.
Most projects under the "google" org will have exactly the same disclaimer about not being official Google products.
replyCrazy.
replyAnd this project uses "google" in its org, so I would assume it is offical or at least lawyers are running toward the owner with lawsuits.
But at least they are under the Google organization. Thing is anyone could create an organization, name it something like "googlesomething", use Google logos, and design it in a way that some users might believe it has an official connection.
replyCouldn't Google do a cease and desist for that kind of impersonation?
replyI think so, but it could be enough for someone to create such an organization, share it on HN for malicious purposes, such as infecting devices, and have it taken down only afterward. I'm not saying that's what happened here, but it does illustrate a potential attack vector.
replyGoogle operates across so many verticals that it's difficult to argue a side project is outside the scope of Google’s business and therefore Google could argue it has copyright over the work. To make it easier for engineers to keep contributing to open source, there’s a fairly straightforward path to release code through a Google-owned repository (if you look at github.com/google it is full of personal projects alongside official ones).
replyThere is an official process where an engineer can apply to a committee to have Google waive any copyright claim. That requires additional work so if your goal is simply to publish the code as open source and you do not mind it living under the Google org, using the Google repo path is usually much faster.
Disclaimer: ex-googler, not a lawyer, not arguing whether or not the situation with copyright assignment is legally enforceable or not/good or bad/etc.