Yeah that's kind of the impression that I had.. should have ran it past his superiors. Hope he learns something from this instead of deflecting like he seems to be doing.

Particularly for a company that possibly has to navigate high-volume, often frivolous litigation and brand attacks from trolls. I have been in similar situations having to partner with legal defending the most frivolous things on products released. You literally sign docs to not do such things when u onboard. Not sure what the point of broadcasting this is though.

Yeah this is super weird to me, because the processes at Google for employees to release and attribute ownership of open source projects are extremely clear and well established. It's genuinely hard for me to imagine this happening in a way that confused or caught the author off guard.

It's totally fair to question the wisdom of those processes and policies!

But I'm pretty skeptical of the "I'm surprised I got in trouble for this" narrative.

Not only that but not clearing with your management that you're not working on something that is actually being worked on as a product.

Definitely they put some manager and/or team in a very uncomfortable position releasing this.

Your ships would have been sunk during the 2002 Millennial challenge and an entire bureaucracy would defend you for the next 20 years.