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by diggan 488 days ago
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Google:

- Projects under the `google` GitHub organization is from Google itself (Google for some reason force projects from Google employees to be umbrellaed under their own organization for some reason, even if it's a personal project)

- Google follows their own rules (applies to any "Big Tech" company)

- Google actually cares about correcting mistakes unless they hit the news/social media

- YouTube and Google tries to make the experience for you, the consumer (on YouTube: consumer = creators + viewers), as good as they can

2 comments

> Google's common Java, C++ and JavaScript library for parsing, formatting, and validating international phone numbers

It does seem this repo is “from Google.”

I think they mean that just because code is under github.com/google, it doesn't make it an "official" Google thing.

For example, yapf[0] is under the Google Github org but has the disclaimer:

>Note YAPF is not an official Google product (experimental or otherwise), it is just code that happens to be owned by Google.

libphonenumber doesn't have any similar disclaimer and does seem to be an "official" Google product, but it's hard to tell what Google considers official or not.

[0] https://github.com/google/yapf

Google does not offer (m)any developer facing "official" products. Google offers "official" products for consumers or enterprises (e.g., Gmail, Cloud Platform), but all of their FOSS code, of which there are many, are all "unofficial"; they are FOSS projects that happen to be developed by Google employees but come with a normal zero liability FOSS license (as opposed to their "official" products, which do come with some liability user agreements/contracts).
> Google for some reason force projects from Google employees to be umbrellaed under their own organization for some reason, even if it's a personal project

I don't think that is true. Google employees can have regular personal projects. If you have a "personal" project that is done under the scope of your employment (e.g., you work on YouTube and you wrote a tool to, I dunno, manage Makefiles to help yourself and/or other coworkers, then that would be a "Google project" housed under `google` even though it's not an "official" product).