alt Hacker NewsI'm noticing a few commenters who work (worked?) at Google (inferred from comment history) who are critical of this person's actions.
First: you ought to disclose that information when commenting on a topic that relates in some way to your financial incentives.
Second: when I worked at Google under Chrome it was very common for individuals and teams to publish projects to open source repositories under Google-managed Github orgs. In fact, for most of my tenure ('15-'21) my team had license to publish to Github unilaterally (no approval from the open source office required). Great power comes with great responsibility, but also I would put to you that publishing an open source project like this one is part of Google's culture.
Firing seems an extreme consequence for the perceived damage of a long-tenured employee's behavior in this case.
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Is it so extreme?
If you work at Google, there's a very clear policy for doing any outside "work" (volunteering, an open source side project, a business, being on a board, etc.): if it's related to your day-to-day work and/or related to Google's business (which virtually anything software is), you need to fill out a disclosure form and get a go-ahead from legal.
Obviously a Google Workspace CLI is related to Google. Why would you release this without getting a go-ahead?
I'm sad that a clearly talented engineer who cares about users was fired. I wish more engineers cared enough to make things like this. But it seems like poor judgment from the engineer's side :(
(Note: I do work at Google. This is my personal writing, though. Nothing to do with my employer)
Bottom line, he did something that affected the company without any authority. His action implied the product was Google blessed without the company fully knowing about it. Google has spent billions to protect its reputation and then you have a random guy put out a self create product without the company even knowing. They had a case for suing him for millions. Of Course, they wouldn't have been able to collect but it would have been hell for him. They also had a case for criminal fraud. All in all he's lucky he only got fired.
So is it normally allowed to publish a non-Google-affiliated repo under Google's brand? This seems weird to me, and I can't understand why he didn't just do it under his own name.
I did work at Google until a year ago, when I quit and sold my stock, but not in a team that remotely deals with open source so idk how this works.
Most big companies attract rule followers. They err on the side of avoiding taking risks like this, which is why they work there (and why there’s so many in this thread talking about rules). It benefits big companies to have mostly rule followers because you can’t have a too many people going in different directions. You need stability and a unified direction, that usually comes from the rulers making the rules. The fewer rule breakers generally find their way to the top, or get canned
This employee’s decision to break the rules, while addressing a real need in the market, must have really pissed off some people above, for better or worse. Google could have just rolled with it but I’m sure it would have stepped on someone else’s plans. Career defining moment, but they didn’t have the political capital it seems. I don’t think they will have much trouble finding work elsewhere though
See also: Power: Why Some People Have It--And Others Don't
Used to be part of Google’s culture until the AI wars and walled garden present we find ourselves in.
> I'm noticing a few commenters who work (worked?) at Google (inferred from comment history) who are critical of this person's actions.
Tangent: did you really go through people’s histories far back enough to find out they were googlers/ex-googlers? Did you use an agent to do that?
Former Googler here, and one that has open-sourced projects while working in Cloud.
This is certainly not the case in other product areas and for specifically for something that uses the Google name.
If I was expected to go through a full IARC committee in order to get my little Discord bot open sourced under my own account, something that uses the Google name would likely have to get IARC + Legal approvals, along with a proper launch/privacy review.
The OP also notes that they had a competing product in the process of development when they "launched" theirs, likely leading to significant internal confusion, and is something that would've been caught during a review.
I'm gunna be real, this whole thing smells of "I'm purposely bit telling the whole truth" and looks like clout chasing.