> (This is not an official Google product) It appears that Google's policy is that all open source personal projects be hosted under its GitHub account. Thus, I think "Google open sources" is a bit misleading; that implies that it's an official project being used by Google, whereas this just looks like a personal project being hosted by Google due to their requirements.
One of the replies was right to point out this URL here: https://opensource.google.com/docs/iarc/
The key passage is this:
> As part of your employment agreement, Google most likely owns intellectual property (IP) you create while at the company. Because Google’s business interests are so wide and varied, this likely applies to any personal project you have.
We have two systems for Googlers to release code. We want Googlers to open source stuff. It makes everyone happier. So we have one method, which is really simple and pretty fast-track, usually taking about a week. That's what you see here: Google retains the copyright, we release it under Apache 2 to a Google-owned GitHub organization. The repo owners can then patch their repository without further approval steps (Google owns the copyright on that new work too), accept patches (as long as the submitter has signed the CLA) and we trust owners to act with common sense (e.g. don't change the license :) ). If the Googler leaves the company, they are free to fork the repository.
The other method is IARC as detailed in the URL, where a committee has to approve that the work is something that Google is OK with handing the copyright over to. I think the most common example is Googlers who write games, but of course people have all sorts of reasons for why they want to hold onto the copyright.
We recognize the challenge that comes with releasing repositories under the Google GitHub organization, but for those repositories to be not official. Headlines like "Google open sources [x]" is legally true but not spiritually so: the original author is the person who really open sourced and owns it, and Google is not really putting its institutional brand behind it. We have to balance that with the fact that we really need to know where all our repositories are, and be able to administer them, such as enabling CLA checks and forcing 2FA. The GitHub setup right now means that means putting repos under orgs we control.
We've spoken before about having a separate org that the non-official repos sit under, but this has always presented its own difficulties: if a project takes off, when does it "graduate" to the main org? What breaks if that happens? (Go code would for sure) What if the author feels they should graduate but we don't? Would projects in the non-official org not get the attention they deserve? etc. etc. Given that it's not a clear win, we've not opted to do that.
That said, I feel like I've seen the "Google releases [x]" headline on Hacker News more of late, and I am not sure if that's because submitters are excited and editorializing, or if there's genuine confusion. I'd love to hear any thoughts people have on that.