Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by frollogaston 39 days ago
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.
3 comments
cdata 39 days ago
Simply put: all work published to Google repos is implicitly affiliated with Google.

In my team's case we would include expectation-setting language in the README.md so that it was clear that the project was not an officially-supported Google product.

As far as I know, no-one ever lost their job for failing to set that expectation. A gentle correction from legal was sufficient to set the world right.

link
frollogaston 39 days ago
But there's an approval process to create such a repo under the Google name, right? I'm not seeing that he followed that.
link
cdata 39 days ago
When I was there, there was no universal process; different teams had different processes based on their focus. There was a launch process for Google products and there was the open source office for approving open source code (which amounted to a rubber stamp in my experience; they mainly checked for boilerplate issues). As I said above, my team and others were allowed to publish at our discretion.

Even if this person violated that process, it is an extreme consequence to fire them for that infraction.

link
msm_ 38 days ago
>there was the open source office for approving open source code (which amounted to a rubber stamp in my experience; they mainly checked for boilerplate issues)

In 2018 I applied for a permission to work on an open-source project, in my own spare time, and I was denied. The problem was the license (AGPL is like poison to corporations), but it's my after-hours side project anyway so I still don't get why it mattered.

link
frollogaston 38 days ago
They basically deny everything. They say they don't want to give bored people a reason to leave, but that's seemingly outweighed but not wanting to give bored people something besides their day job to focus on. Even at Google, plenty spend non-work hours on work, instead they might spend it on a side project.

They don't really have the teeth to deny it if you live in California, where there are laws partially invalidating those non-compete clauses, but most people will just accept it.

link
magicalist 39 days ago
Releasing vibe coded handling of google account credentials seems like the biggest problem with this.

Agreed it's gross if the big problem with execs was that it got social media buzz and it embarrassed official products or something.

link
whstl 39 days ago
The repo is still online and is official [1], so Google doesn't really seem to care about its existence.

[1] https://developers.google.com/workspace/drive/api/samples

link
magicalist 39 days ago
It's a fair point that it's still up, though looking just now for two minutes there are at least some issues with auth[1] which would make me really not trust it.

It was just speculation about what could be bad enough if they really did have permission to release it, but the OP is being so cagey below now I'm just wondering if they got release permission but misrepresented what they would be releasing or something.

> and is official [1]

FWIW no idea what you're trying to point out on that page unless you mean the one link to a different project in the same github org indicates the org is official, but that never seemed in doubt in this thread of comments.

[1] https://github.com/googleworkspace/cli/issues/780

link
whstl 39 days ago
This project is in an organization that has 57 other public repos with code by several other Google employees, is linked to by Google own documentation, and the only public member of the organization is (hopefully still) a Google employee.

Google has multiple Github Organizations that have all degrees of oficial-ness to it.

This is not someone releasing something in their private account and plastering Google logos over it.

link
jrochkind1 38 days ago
I don't know that I'd call the repo "non-Google-affiliated", but whatever it is, it is still up [1] in a google-owned github organization [2], which also includes several other repos with the line "This is not an officially supported Google product," such as this one that's two years old [3].

So, yeah, whatever it is, I'd say it looks normal.

[1] https://github.com/googleworkspace/cli

[2] https://github.com/googleworkspace

[3] https://github.com/googleworkspace/redriveapp

link