[tlogan]

In any reasonable company (with common sense leadership), someone would not be fired for doing something (with good intentions) that does not harm company very much.

Releasing something like this did not really harm the company (the project is still on GitHub).

Any smart executive could have spun the release of this CLI into a win.

Even if some other team complained that this was encroaching on their work, a smart executive would say: “cool show me your work tomorrow morning so we can replace this with you work”

[xnx]

What if they were told not to do it and they still did?

[tlogan]

I do not want to speculate too much. Sure, many things could have happened, even things unrelated to this project, that led to the firing.

But since this project is still on GitHub, I would say the project itself was probably not so bad that releasing it should be a fireable offense.

So my thinking is this:

Did the employee act with the goal of helping the company?

If the answer is yes, and the action did not cause serious harm to the company, then you do not fire the employee. At my old company, the employee would probably be sent to take a couple of courses related to whatever rule they broke.

In general, smart people should be encouraged to take initiative.

The real problem (and the reason why you have all these HR rules) is when you have stupid employees who take initiative. Actually, you should never hire someone who is both unintelligent and full of initiative. It is okay to hire someone who is stupid and lazy and has no initiative (You need those people too).

And OP is obviously smart and talented and should be encouraged to take initiative.

[mewpmewp2]

Depends on the reason. If there was a valid reason not to release it, then sure. But it's hard for me to see what can be so problematic about releasing a cli wrapper. It's hard to think of anything non political. And politics isn't valid reason to me. If someone from the leadership was e.g. blocking the release out of pettiness then I'd cheer on the person releasing it - assuming they know the risks.