Yes. While they may have been justified in firing him for not following policy, they also lost a talented engineer. (I'm sure they don't care) I would have done the intelligent thing here and looked at how the project could have been made official. But that decision would have had to been made at a very high level, maybe even the CEO, because anyone lower down would have made a narrow and parochial decision in favour of the org they were protecting, rather than in the best interests of the company.